


Homing

by Sophia_Prester



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Backstory, F/M, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3634284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophia_Prester/pseuds/Sophia_Prester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ellen's story is no more and no less tragic than any other hunter's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in 2008 for SPN Summergen. Also, this is set in the same 'verse as "Apocrypha."

One nice thing about this part of Nebraska, there's not a blessed thing between you and the horizon. Outside the Roadhouse, the blacktop may only stretch north and south, but dead north takes you up to Highway 91. South, it's only a couple of turns and if you've kept your eye on the signs, you're right there on Route 2.

All you need then is a decent map and enough sense to know which interstates run north-south and which run east-west, and you can go anywhere. 

Anywhere at all. 

Any time you need.

* * *

Most days, "anywhere, any time" means Ellen might take the truck up to Brewster to stock up on groceries or make an emergency pretzel run. Sometimes, she'll go to a diner about twenty miles out, someplace she's been often enough to be considered something of a regular, and let someone else wait on her for a change.

A careless "Ash, I'm headin' out," as she lifts the keys off their nail, and she's on her way. Simple as that. She may not be going far or be gone for long, but the thing is, Ellen could _keep on_ going. 

If she wanted to. Which she doesn't, but there are times when the thought won't leave her alone.

It would only take a bit of a whim and she could be having dinner in Omaha or Lincoln or even in Denver if she really wanted to. Or, if Jo just happened to call one of these days out of the blue, and say she was in Chicago and in trouble, Ellen could get there in less than a day, no problem. 

She could just grab her keys and go.

The thought is either comforting or troubling, depending on what kind of mood she's in. Either way, the thought always strikes deep.

* * *

People--meaning hunters--generally don't give much thought to where Ellen came from. It's where she _is_ that matters to them. To them, Ellen means Roadhouse. Some hunters who pass through talk as if they know for a fact she grew up there, waiting on tables and sweeping up, and no doubt teething on the pool cues. A few idiots figure she started catering to the hunting crowd only because Bill had pulled her into it.

It's fine if they think that. Her story's none of their damn business. It's no more and no less tragic than what got most of the Roadhouse regulars into the hunting life.

Her father died; a ghost was to blame. End of story. 

As stories go, Ellen would say it was nothing special; nearly everyone who passed through the Roadhouse could play some variation on that particular tune. 

A werewolf savaged Diana's son, and when she was drunk enough she might let slip that she was the one who wound up putting a silver bullet in her baby's heart. Gordon's sister was taken by vampires. Roger had the rotten luck to go digging in the wrong place. John's wife was slashed open and burned to a crisp by a demon. Linda Jean made a stupid deal and has been looking for a way out of it ever since. Ash's best friend got himself possessed and damn near killed Ash before getting killed himself. 

At least, these are the stories she's actually _heard_. There's probably a bit more to the tales than people let on, but that's just the way of it.

She suspects the real stories are hidden in the way Gordon used to sit hunched over at his bar stool, glaring angrily at something no one else could see. There are probably dozens of stories in the tarot cards Diana deals over and over and over again as she tries to find an ending she can live with. She thought she heard a hint of one in the way John snapped his phone shut after barking orders to one of his boys like he was their commanding officer and not their father. She can read a hell of a lot into the way Ash stays lost in his research or lost in beer and television, never growing up, never moving on from college and the moment his life got turned upside-down.

Her story is tucked away and all but lost in the way she's been at the Roadhouse for two decades and change, rarely going far and only occasionally hunting, but always, _always_ looking at the maps the hunters bring in to plot their next hunt, tracing the best routes to Denver, Seattle, New York, Chicago.

It's a story she doesn't think about much, not unless the wind is coming down from the north, moving through in crashing pulses through grass, through trees. She'll jerk awake then, convinced she can hear the ocean just outside her window.

Even after she's had a good listen and told herself five, six, seven times it's just the wind, she'll get up and wrestle the window shut and yank the shade down so far the return won't work the next morning.

She'll eventually manage to get to sleep again, but it's not a restful one. It's too full of big rooms and narrow staircases and the same persistent, hissing, crashing sound that's too much like a heartbeat. The wind doesn't whistle across a tin roof the same way it rattles against cedar shingles, but that makes no difference in dreams.

In the morning, she'll be tuckered out from too much dreaming, and groggy from the stifling air and filtered sunlight.

The fact that Bill's not there to gripe about the heat or having to fix the shade doesn't help matters any.

* * *

Back when Bill was alive, Ellen could count on the fact that sooner or later, anyone who knew them would eventually ask her if she ever got tired of him being gone all the time.

"Haven't got tired enough to ask him to stop," she'd say, hardly bothering to be polite about it. She rarely looked at whoever asked the question. She'd just keep on doing whatever it was she was doing--pulling a beer, putting away glasses, wiping the bar, paying the bills. Her and Bill, it was none of anyone's business.

After he died, she wasted some time wondering what might have happened if things had been a little bit different. If she'd stayed on the road with him. If she'd pulled him back from the road bit by bit over the years. If she'd put her foot down and made a fuss, maybe even using their daughter as an 'or else'.

In the end, she knew 'what if' was a stupid game. She had a daughter to raise, and dozens of people who looked to her for food, drink, information, and a place to rest and trade stories. She stopped wondering. She wasn't going to let herself become a ghost trapped in a human body, always running over the same ground, re-living the same hurt over and over again until she was so deep in that rut that she _couldn't_ move on.

Still, she managed to forgive John Winchester a long time before she could forgive herself.

* * *

Ellen is practical to the bone; too practical to think that if things had gone just a little bit different that year, that if her tenth year had ended just as peacefully as all those years before, she'd have met Bill just the same.

See, there's an argument to be made that her father's death was just the first link in a short, solidly forged chain that led her straight to William Harvelle's side. As arguments go, it's a fairly convincing one.

Despite that, and even though she knows the dangers of 'what if,' Ellen sometimes daydreams about how she might, when she was Jo's age (no, a little older, just _because_ ), have finally had enough of her father's lollygagging and freeloading and failed ambition and taken off to make something of herself.

What she makes of herself in these fancies doesn't matter. What matters is that she'd find her way to someplace very like the Roadhouse, never mind the details of _how_ or _where_. Maybe she'd have stopped in for a drink after a long, hard day. Maybe she'd have been working there, putting up chairs and sweeping under the tables just like she might be doing as she daydreamed, and there'd be one last chair to put up--only someone would be sitting there.

The man would be hunched over his beer like he'd just lost his job or his dog or his best friend, but he'd look up at her, and she'd see a glint in those deep-set eyes that said he was only slouching because that's how he chose to sit. Nothing more, nothing less.

These days, Ellen can't imagine seeing Bill and not immediately knowing in blood and bone that she loved him. Truth was, it wasn't that simple. It took nearly three years before she allowed herself to think of him as anything but Bobby's friend.

Now, more people than she's ever met know her as the woman who runs the Roadhouse, as Bill Harvelle's widow. Just how, thirty-four years ago, she found herself being dragged to potlucks and cocktail parties as the writer's daughter, as Donny Mitchell's little girl.

Ellen imagines her mother would have railed at her for letting people define her as belonging to someone else. Donny Mitchell's little girl. Miss Sylvia's foster daughter. Bud and Katie Corrigan's apprentice. Bobby Singer's sometime helper and courier. Bill Harvelle's wife. Jo Harvelle's mother.

Ellen supposes she can see that, and when the thought crosses her mind, she can't help but smile a little. Janis (always 'Janis,' never 'Mom') would have had a point, but also would have missed another one, a big one. 

Or maybe Janis would have learned by now. Lord knows it took Ellen long enough to get there. Or maybe the real Janis, not the Janis who only exists in fragments in Ellen's memory, would have known the right of it all along.

And as for that argument that everything that happened to her--that every choice she made--led straight from losing her father to finding Bill, she doesn't much care for it.

It wasn't like she chose to trade her father's life for her life with Bill, for being Jo's mother. How could she, seven years before she even knew Bill existed? Still, even though it wasn't logical, or even possible, she sometimes feels like she _did_ choose.

All she did was close a door and run down a flight of stairs, but it was a choice. And it's a game of 'what if' she will never play.

* * *

Ellen still dreams of steep, open staircases whose welcoming, sunlit landings terrify her more than any dank and shadowy basement stairwell ever could.

If she thinks about it too much, she can even conjure up the smells that carried down the stairs as she sat halfway up and halfway down like in that Milne poem. In her memories, the sound of pounding surf mixes with her father's voice as he recited the verse from memory, casually and expertly teasing out the natural rhythm, pushing the rhyme just enough to make it stand out. 

A breeze always cut down the stairs and through the house, carrying the seaweedy, mineral smell of ocean along with wisps of wild rose, dry grass, and occasionally, the cloyingly sweet smell of pot.

It was nothing like the must and damp of that one basement she helped Bill clear out, all close and dark, both of them gagging on the scent of rot. It was horrible, and once they'd dug up and torched the bones (too many of them, all so very small) the two of them silently went back to a motel room whose reek of cheap air freshener and decades of cigarettes was refreshing by contrast. 

They didn't talk until after showers. As they dried off, they told each other emphatically that this was it, this was the last time they would do anything like this, and they allowed themselves to believe it for the night. Ellen fell asleep quickly enough, all told. Bill was the one taking it worse, which surprised neither of them. That was always the case, with child ghosts.

But Ellen was the one who woke at two-thirty a.m., shaking and shuddering, clamping the heels of her hands to her ears to shut out the roar of traffic on the interstate. Bill sat up beside her and tentatively rested a hand on her shoulder, not knowing yet if comfort would make things worse or better.

After a minute, but before Bill could draw his hand back, Ellen lowered her hands and leaned into his touch, groaning in misery and pleasure as he took his cue and kneaded into the tightness that always settled in the crook between shoulder and neck.

"That'd give anyone bad dreams, El," he said plainly, no pity in his words.

She didn't tell him she'd been dreaming of the feel of sunlight on her back, the taste of root beer candy, the smell of Coppertone and bug spray, the hardness of the step under her tailbone, the pleasure of a lazy summer day reading, and the sound of the ocean thrumming like a heartbeat.

* * *

That summer, her tenth summer, Ellen re-read each and every one of the _Little House_ books. Some of them twice. As ever, her father pushed and pushed her to read Tolkein and Bradbury, but it never took. She'd much rather read about cozy, homely things, especially if those things were a struggle first to win and then to hold on to. Even then, the stories of how to churn butter or how to build a house and make a home struck her as far more fantastic than magic rings or haunted carnivals.

For her, the lives of Laura Ingalls or Caddie Woodlawn or Anne Shirley were pure magic. They were old friends. They were as comfortable as old socks. As for the other books, the ones that everyone said were supposed to be magic and wonderful and mind-opening ("pathways to other, more wonderful worlds," her father always said), she didn't even get as far as Frodo leaving the Shire before giving up in sheer apathy. The whole birthday party scene was fun enough, but other than that... no.

That was when Ellen started sneaking off to the staircase to read _Little Women_ for the third time. It was just too hard to avoid her father, otherwise. It wasn't that he disapproved of what she read; it was that he'd keep on coming up to her, smiling and bright-eyed, asking her how far she'd gotten in _Fellowship_ and what did she think of it, who was her favorite character, and oh! had she gotten to Moria yet? No? What about the Council of Elrond? Had she even met Strider yet... He was so anxious to hear just how much she loved the book that Ellen wanted to curl up and vanish.

She'd tried telling him, of course. Tried telling him she didn't like that kind of thing--no, not even Peter Pan, _really_ \--but the look on his face (puzzled, then hurt, then puzzled all over again) left her feeling like she'd carelessly stomped a duckling to death.

* * *

It's been a while since she's read anything that wasn't for work. Newspapers from all the surrounding states and a few known hot-spots, carefully scoured for odd patterns in obituaries and the like. Reams of stuff Ash prints out for her when she asks him to help gather information on a case.

If Ash finds something real good (or real bad), he'll often come scrambling out of the back, holding out his laptop and forcing her to read for herself right off the screen, no matter what she happens to be doing at the moment. 

She has a couple of reference books with Post-it notes sticking out every which way, and a few things she's held onto for sentimental reasons, but the bookshelves in the Roadhouse aren't as full as they could be.

Most of Bill's old books have passed into Bobby's keeping, but that's okay. It really is. There's more than a few of those books that are probably safer at Bobby's place, all told. A few of the safer ones have made their way back to the Roadhouse over the years, given that she's a convenient way for Bobby or Jim to get things to people who don't have anything resembling a fixed mailing address. 

Ellen figures it doesn't hurt to look through the books again as they're passing through, taking a moment to say 'hello,' as it were. She might smile when she sees a note in the margin or run her finger under a familiar scrawl. 

When the time comes, she'll hand the books over to people who need them more than she does.

* * *

Back in her bedroom, Ellen keeps a wooden cigar box filled with notes, postcards, birthday cards, and other oddments. There is a faded purple bookmark, folded in thirds and falling apart. There are six poems, still with the ragged edges from where she tore them out of a spiral notebook. She doesn't read them, but she knows they're there. It's enough.

There are several photos perched up on top of the television. They've been there so long that she's fallen out of the habit of looking at them regularly. And when something does happen, and she does stop to look at them, enough time has passed that it hits her anew just how handsome Bill was, or how tiny Jo used to be. Whenever this happens, she'll lose a good twenty minutes or so to woolgathering before she shakes her head sharply and tells herself that there's work that needs doing and there's only one person to do it.

There are other things around that make her think of her family more frequently--and with less a sense of dislocation--than the photographs.

On the refrigerator, there are forty-two magnets, little rubber or plastic ones with raised edges and print, each shaped like a different state, plus British Columbia. They're arranged more or less as they would be on the map. Less, rather than more, because Vermont is the same size as Texas, and at one point Bill forgot he'd already sent her Colorado. Alaska and Hawaii are missing, of course. So's much of the deep south. Rhode Island should also be there, but Bill said he couldn't find a magnet. He'd been calling from a police station in Providence when he told her that, though, so Ellen always suspected there was a little more to that particular story.

Ellen has been to most of the states on her refrigerator, has hunted in many of them, even lived in a few, but when she thinks of South Dakota, her first thought is often of a deep burnt-orange outlined in white, not of junked cars and rooms upon rooms of books. Nebraska is a cool, pale green, despite the dryness of the summer-burnt prairie surrounding the Roadhouse. Missouri is fluorescent yellow. Kansas, hunter orange.

Massachusetts, however, is not gold. Not gold at all.

The day the Roadhouse burns down, Ellen gets a small padded envelope in the mail. There's no return address, but the loopy, too-neat handwriting is the same as that on the handful of postcards she's got stashed in the cigar box. 

This is much more than a postcard, though. Those don't do much more than tell her that Jo's alive and sends her love. She rips the envelope open right there by the mailbox, hands trembling and breath stilled. There's no letter, no note, and just when she thinks her heart might contract to a nothing in her chest, a small blue and silver object slides out onto her palm.

Jo has sent her North Carolina.

Ellen's fist closes around it tight enough to leave behind dents in her palm when she finally kisses the back of her hand and relaxes her grip. It takes her a few moments of staring at the ground and concentrating on her breathing before she lets herself head back inside.

She's not sure if she'll put the magnet on the old map or start a new one, maybe up on the freezer door.

Once she makes it inside, though, it's only to find an argument that's about to tip over into a brawl. She shoves the magnet in her jacket pocket and stomps over to shout some sense back into some folk who should damn well know better.

It settles, although it almost doesn't, and it leaves her shaken enough that she forgets about the magnet. She almost remembers when she slaps Maine back into place after Ash borrowed it to pin up some McDonalds coupons or something else equally stupid, but annoyance pushes the memory aside until later.

Goddamn Ash. Things were always turning up where they shouldn't when he was around.

* * *

The first time one of the Staffordshire figurines from the mantel showed up on her landing, Ellen thought it was just her father being stupid. She carefully put it back where it belonged, thinking that was the end of it. It wasn't.

These days, of course, she'd know better. Hell, Jo would have known better at her age, but Jo had grown up knowing all about the kinds of dangers they'd never talk about in PSAs at the end of _Rescue Rangers._

"C'mon El, there's no need to get into that now. She's too young to be hearing about this," Bill said once or maybe twice, but Ellen didn't even need to argue. A steely, steady look was all it took. Besides, he knew better.

So, Bill taught Jo how to clean a gun and care for a knife. He even gave her one of his good knives for her very own, holding it out to her hilt-first even though the blade was strapped into a thick leather sheath.

It wasn't quite what Ellen had in mind by way of preparing their little girl, and maybe Bill knew that. Maybe he was trying to make a point. Once you know about something, after all, you'd better be prepared to deal with it.

He'd looked at Ellen after he handed over the knife, one eyebrow raised as if to ask if she was sure about all of this. Ellen wasn't sure, and she wasn't happy (the way she crossed her arms over her chest let Bill know that without any doubt).

No, she didn't like it, but Jo needed to be safe, and Bill knew what he was doing. Mostly.

* * *

"So, what's your story?" Bill asked her the first time they met. He'd settled on Bobby's couch, long legs splayed out and arm draped across the back as if he'd laid claim to the thing long ago. She wanted not to like him, but it was a lost cause from the start.

She'd brought him coffee, of course, while Bobby rummaged through his books in search of something that might give them something they could use against what might be a skinwalker.

"Just crashing here for a few days. Lost my last job 'cause I took too many 'days off' while I was hunting down a weeping woman." Ellen shrugged as she leaned against the door-jamb, cradling her own cup in both hands. "Managed to get rid of her before she drowned any more kids, though, so I'm not counting it a huge loss."

He nodded and sipped at his coffee. His mouth twisted in amused disgust. "Bobby still water this stuff down with holy water?"

Ellen's was not similarly fortified. She'd been the one who'd brewed it, after all. "What do _you_ think?"

The look he gave her over the rim of his cup, dangerously close to a wink, said he thought she had a good point. It also said that he knew she hadn't _really_ told him her story, but that he'd let it go for the moment.

Only for the moment, mind you.

Ellen swallowed, hard, a too-big gulp of coffee making a rough journey down. Not pleasant, but at least she had something she could blame for the sudden, burning fullness in her chest.

* * *

Bill was twelve years older than she was, something that bothered her at first. After all, they'd met when she was seventeen, and six months afterwards he'd tipped over into his thirties while she was still in her teens.

No wonder that when she first felt that twist deep in her gut the next time she saw his truck pull up to Bobby's porch, she told herself to drop it, to leave it alone.

And she did. For a while, anyhow.

Bill Harvelle was too old and too scrawny, she reminded herself whenever the daydreams began to creep in around the edges. Handsome enough, but a bit shopworn, with the crows-feet already setting up camp around the corners of those deep blue eyes. Too many scars. She was quick to notice the layered scars across his knuckles and the pale pink of a burn scar reaching up the side of his neck. 

Then there was a deep, straight scar low across the small of his back. She'd noticed it when his shirt rode up as he was reaching to pull a book off a high shelf. Noticed, and remembered a little better than she should have, perhaps.

"So, what's your story?" she finally asked him, when she'd gotten tired of telling herself to ignore what was damn well obvious.

It took her three years to find her way, but she finally got there.

* * *

That summer (it was always _that_ summer) Ellen spent most of the trip from Philly to Woods Hole reading. Well, trying to read, anyhow. Her father kept on interrupting her with all kind of stories about how much fun they were going to have together once they got to the island.

"We'll have all summer together, Nelly-belle."

The nickname had appeared out of nowhere while Janis was in the hospital and he was desperate to keep things cheerful, and Ellen hadn't worked up the courage to tell him how much she hated it. After all, she'd gained no more fondness for Nellie Olson on this re-reading of the _Little House_ books. He should have known better, as far as she was concerned.

"Just you and me, right?" he said, looking over the back of the seat and nearly swerving into the oncoming lanes before a blaring horn snapped him back to reality.

Ellen scootched further down on the back seat, raising her book to cover her face. She wasn't reading, though. She tried, but couldn't get past the next line.

_They were cozy and comfortable in their little house made of logs, with the snow drifted around it and the wind crying because it could not get in by the fire._

Normally she could imagine herself right there in that cozy cabin, but not today, not when the sun had turned the station wagon into an oven, and her sweaty thighs first stuck to then kept slipping on the vinyl seat. Her story, her means of escape to a home that wasn't, had turned into nothing more than words on a page.

She kept the book raised, though, because she really didn't want to talk. But the more she stayed silent, the more his hands spun through the air and the louder his voice got as he talked about fishing trips, or all the concerts there were on the island, or rainy days where she could spend the day reading while he spent the day writing, or mornings spent walking the beaches with their heads bent looking for wampum or beach glass or pirate gold or keys to lost cities and maybe hunting ghosts and hey... are you listening, Nelly-belle?

"I can't wait."

He was quiet for a while after that, and that was fine by her, even though it was a pointedly _hurt_ quiet.

Why'd he have to go and remind her it was just the two of them? It wasn't like she didn't _know_ that. 

Ellen tried to lose herself in the story of Ma and Pa and a little log cabin on a wide, wide prairie and forget that she was lying down in the back of an old station wagon with everything she owned stowed in the wayback.

According to her father, they were on their way to a new life, and a new home, but as far as she was concerned, it was just another one of his stories.

* * *

Bill was just full of stories. Or, as she often told him, just plain full of it.

"No, I swear to you I'm not making this up. I saw it for myself when I was in-country."

Ellen flicked her eyes at him, wanting to glare but not wanting to take her eyes off the road. Bill was lounging in the passenger seat, hands laced behind his head. His elbow was only one sharp turn away from knocking her in the ear.

"Bill, when you tell me you saw something 'in-country,' you know I'm going to know it's half made-up."

He laughed at that, something she felt in the slight shaking of the bench seat rather than heard. 

There were more than a few veterans who'd drifted into hunting when they returned to the States. Most of the vets she'd encountered would ostentatiously clam up or get real, real somber if anything about 'the war' came up. Bill, though, Bill would tell you his war stories at the drop of a hat and keep on telling them until you had to damn near threaten violence to get him to stop. She'd heard the one about the pig more times than she cared to count. Then there was the one about the Special Forces guy and his dog. Or the stories about the crazy games the SEALs attached to his unit would play.

Sometimes, though, he came up with something that wound up being more than just background noise.

" _Cao dai_ Buddhism," he said, the foreign words coming out unaccented through the Midwest twang. "I shit you not, El, Victor Hugo was one of the big three saints."

"Right. In Vietnam. They made a French author a saint." She tried to sound stern and sarcastic--she was still feeling prickly towards him for taking such a damn fool chance when they were shutting down that haunt--but a laugh crept out through the cracks.

"Best French food I ever had was in Saigon," he pointed out. "But anyhow, we were out on the Plain of Reeds--like a prairie, but it flooded every year so that the river was damn near _everywhere_ , more like a lake, you could barely see the horizon--and anyhow, we'd be out on patrol, just going quiet through the water, and every now and again there'd be these little shrines sticking out of the water. Damned if some of them didn't have a picture of Victor Hugo right there in the middle. Strangest thing." He waited for a comment, but didn't seem offended when one didn't arrive. 

"One of the guys swore he saw pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt and Will Rogers in a couple of those shrines." There was a perfectly timed pause. "Course, he was so full of shit his eyes were brown."

Ellen shook her head and laughed, just like Bill meant her to. She couldn't stay mad at Bill for long, not even when he'd nearly gotten himself killed.

That night, she dreamed of dozens of shabby little houses sticking up out of the water. The water wasn't still, not the way Bill had described the Plain of Reeds, but gray and churning, rocking the little houses this way and that.

Ellen stood at the top of a steep meadow that spilled down to the sea, gold and brown, dotted with the red of rose-hips and poison ivy. The little houses were so far away, and she could do nothing about it as one by one, they were taken by the waves until there was only one left.

A little man--an author, but by no means a saint--stood in the doorway of the house. He waved at her, and she didn't know if he was telling her to go away or telling her to come save him. Maybe he was only waving hello. Or goodbye.

Not knowing what else to do, Ellen raised her hand and waved back.

The little house disappeared under the waves, and she was left at the top of the meadow with no way to get home.

* * *

"Well, here it is, Nelly-belle. Home."

Her father dropped his duffel bag on the porch as if it meant they were there to stay. Ellen knew better, of course.

"I thought you said we were only staying here for the summer," she said. They'd be on the road again by mid-August. Still, she was impressed. The house was hidden from the road by a hedge that was half again as tall as her father. She guessed it was privet, because that's what most hedges were made of in the books she read, and she _did_ know enough to recognize yew.

There had been yew hedges in front of the house in Pennsylvania, and Janis had been the one to go out, resentful and grumbling, to hack them back with a big pair of dull hedge shears after they'd nearly grown shut across the front walk.

No, this wasn't yew, and when her father made the sharp turn up into the driveway, she saw that this house wasn't anything like their last house. That had been a little brick box with blank, bare windows, squat and ugly behind the overgrown yew hedges and lumpy, patchy lawn. This house swept up three whole stories from a perfectly flat green lawn. Rather than brick, it was covered with dove-gray shingles and trimmed in clean, tidy white and a deep, almost black green that shone in the sun in its own way. A covered porch wrapped around one half of the house, from halfway across the front and all along one side, turning to disappear across the back. Best of all, the windows actually had diamond-shaped panes, and weren't just dead, expressionless slits of cheap glass bordered in aluminum.

The sunlight danced off these windows, so old that the panes were set at slightly different angles. Later, her father would point out the way the glass rippled, and how that meant it was old. He even found a circle that showed where part of the glass had once been attached to a glass-blower's pipe.

"Let's go round the back," her father said, holding out a hand. Professor Jameson says you can see the Cape across the water if the day's clear enough."

Ellen was so enamored by the house and by the idea that _she'd_ be staying here that she didn't even hesitate before taking her father's hand and letting him lead her to the back porch and a narrow strip of garden that ended at a steep bluff.

Her father walked them right out to the edge of the bluff, where a lichened split-rail fence and a hedge of wild rose was all that kept them from a nasty fall down onto rocks and a small scrap of beach. Ellen wished he wouldn't lean forward so much, hanging halfway over the fence, but of course he did.

It was a hot, sunny day, but so hazy that try as they might, all they could see was silver water leading out and out and out to a blank horizon. She could barely even see the line where sea turned into sky.

They stayed out there just long enough to watch the ferry chugging back towards an invisible mainland. Ellen watched it intently, her fingernails digging deep into the salt-softened wood of the fence.

It was a relief to head back to the shelter of the house. The sun twinkled off the diamond-paned windows, making it look like the house was smiling down at them indulgently. 

For a moment, the way the sun reflected off one of the rippled dormer windows made it look as if there was also someone _in_ the house looking down at them. Ellen stopped so quickly she nearly twisted her ankle. She started to warn her father, but the passing cloud moved out of the sun's path and the figure was gone.

The next morning, they were in the middle of breakfast when her father snapped out of his morning haze into full wakefulness, his mouth in the weak 'o' that meant he could have forgotten anything from the utility bills to the fact that he was supposed to be leading a tutorial.

Ellen braced herself for the inevitable panic and loud declarations of how _stupid_ he was, but instead he grinned slyly.

"Maybe it's a good thing I forgot to tell you last night--especially your first night in your new home--but Professor Jameson told me that the house is haunted."

He took another sip of his coffee, and then the sly grin broadened into a genuine smile. "Isn't that great?"

* * *

At first, like most hunters who weren't out hunting down a specific _something_ , she and Bill mostly worked haunts. The salt-and-burns began to run into each other over the course of those two years. She does remember a few details here and there, mostly out of context.

The time they had to use nearly a gallon of lighter fluid because of the damp. Broken blisters from shoveling without gloves, her palms stinging so badly she couldn't curl her hands shut more than a little. The time they had to get the box containing a murdered woman's bones out of an attic and down four flights of stairs, and the resulting string of arguments and accidents like outtakes from a Laurel and Hardy movie. The smell of scorched earth, and the frown on Bill's face and the flicker in his eyes as he silently ran through the handful of war stories he _wouldn't_ tell. Cursing out paper matchbooks and cheap cardboard matches that bent all to hell and back when she tried to light them.

Specific incidents ran together with all the repeated ills and boredoms of the job until she had to stop and think before she could remember which job came before which, or if she broke her collarbone on the Omaha job when a poltergeist threw her into a wall, or if it was the one up near Billings, when a ghost-induced blind panic made her run and fall down into a culvert.

In general, their jobs all ended in much the same way, barring any kind of incidental injury that might send their usual routine off the rails with hasty retreat to the motel room for a session with the first aid kit or--in more than a few cases--to the emergency room.

Ellen would put all their tools and weapons away in the truck and Bill would erase any signs that might lead the law to them. It wasn't quite housekeeping on her part, and it wasn't quite being back on active duty on his, but it felt like business as usual. It also meant they were about to go home.

* * *

It took Ellen years to get used to the Roadhouse without Bill. Yes, once she stopped actively hunting and started running the place, Bill was gone nearly half the time, but being gone wasn't the same as never coming home.

After a while, she no longer turned to talk to him. She stopped looking up with anticipation when she heard truck tires turn off asphalt onto gravel. It didn't mean she stopped missing him, though.

Some days, she misses him so much she can hardly breathe from it.

These days, she's back to waiting for the phone to ring. When it does ring, she gets very still, trying not to hope. You'd never know from the crisp, almost unwelcoming "Harvelle's" when she does answer that she's desperate to be able to follow that up with a "hey, Jo-baby, where are you? _How_ are you? When are you coming home?"

So far, there hasn't been any such call.

Jo's just trying to follow in her daddy's footsteps, Ellen tells herself. Or maybe she's trying to follow in Ellen's. Ellen was younger than Jo when she set out on her own, much younger, but Jo doesn't want to hear that's how Ellen knows Jo is too young, much too young for the work.

Jo grew up around hunters, even more than Ellen did. She heard their crazy stories, learned about the difficulty and necessity of what they do. Although no one ever knows what they're getting into when they get into hunting, Jo's got a better handle on it than most beginners.

Even experts die. This is something Ellen also tells herself, although she tries hard not to listen. She also tells herself that Jo is desperate to prove herself, desperate to build something that is _hers_. 

Sometimes, Ellen tells herself that maybe Diana's right, and all this is some sort of way for Jo to try to get her daddy _back_. When she tells herself this, she also turns around and tells herself to shut the hell up. It doesn't matter how you go about it--raising the dead is never a good idea, even if there are no spells, no devil's bargains involved.

She tries to tell herself that all she can do is wait, but every hour or so, Ellen pulls her cell phone from her pocket and checks the charge and the signal strength. Ash just rolls his eyes at her if he catches her, but he knows better than to say anything.

Ellen does her best not to dig at what she did wrong in trying to do right by her daughter, but it's hard not to wonder if Jo going on the road was less about hunting and more about leaving the Roadhouse.

"Not under my roof," was the immediate answer when Jo insisted on hunting. It was one of those things said more in anger than in reason, a threat that might have worked if Jo was still twelve. 

But Jo wasn't twelve, and Jo took her at her word. Then she took off before Ellen could gather her wits about her.

Afterwards, Ellen tried to tell Ash that she never believed Jo would actually _leave_ like that. He opened his mouth to make a smart remark, but she narrowed her eyes at him and he slammed it shut again. He should know better than to comment, after he helped Jo cover her tracks the first time she left.

Ellen tells herself she should have known what would happen. Jo had left once before, after all. She knew, but she somehow still didn't believe that her baby would really leave.

* * *

She didn't believe her father, of course. Still, when he told her that the house was haunted, her "really?" was more curious than sarcastic.

"Don't be surprised if you find things in different places than where you left them," he said. The twinkle in his eye warned her that he was likely to try to be clever when she wasn't looking.

"I won't." She was surprised to find that she was a little disappointed that it was all probably a trick, and just another way for him to try to keep her from being sad. Besides, the house didn't seem the kind of place that would be haunted. The house seemed to catch every bit of sunlight, even though it had a covered porch. Her bedroom (not really _hers_ , she reminded herself, just the one she was using) was so bright that the sun woke her at five that morning. 

She could have gone back to sleep, maybe, but there was such a racket of birdsong she wondered how on earth she'd slept through it until now. Once awake, she was hyper-sensitive to every noise. There was the sound of the old Moon Beam alarm clock chipping its way through the minutes, and the occasional creak of wood against wood as boards and beams adjusted to warmth and wind. It was all new, and yet all normal. Still, it kept her half-awake and attentive enough that she didn't miss the sharp double-tap of the screen door snapping shut and bouncing against the door frame. She was out of bed and hustling downstairs in less than ten seconds. Her father shouldn't be awake this early. He'd sleep in until ten or eleven, the way he always did.

If he was up this early, it meant something had happened, like maybe there'd been a phone call from the doctor or something, or he'd been out late and was only just now coming back and that was _never_ good... 

By the time she made it down to the kitchen, Ellen was awake enough to remember that they'd had all the bad news there was to have, and she and her father were now creating this _wonderful_ and _amazing_ new life with just the two of them.

Ellen looked around the cozy kitchen, with its lace curtains and scarred white countertops, and realized she had no idea if Janis would have loved it or hated it. 

She thought it over for a bit, and after a while it wasn't at all hard to see Janis standing there, long brown hair pulled back beneath her blue bandanna as she fried up onions and peppers for some spaghetti sauce, swaying and singing along to the radio and not minding as grease and onion spattered all over the stove and counter.

It wasn't even six o'clock, but Ellen still went out onto the porch. If her father was up, she didn't want him to catch her crying. If he thought she was sad, he would do everything and anything to make her _not_ sad, never realizing that it only made things that much worse.

She let the screen door snap shut behind her. It was the same sharp, doubled sound as before, but it only got a turn of the head and a scowl. She wanted to be miserable and spiky, damn it, not chasing down a stupid ghost story that probably wasn't even true.

"I wanna go home," she grumbled, sitting down on the porch steps. She said it again, not even minding that she didn't know what or where she meant by 'home.' After a minute or two, one--just one--of the rocking chairs on the porch began to rock back and forth, back and forth.

Eventually, she gave in and got up from the porch steps, going to sit in the rocking chair, never mind how much pollen got all over her nightshirt. It was a good thing she knew they were going to leave in a few months, otherwise she'd start thinking of _this_ place as home. And it couldn't be home, not with the two of them the way they were.

When she finally went back inside, her father was still asleep, but three coffee mugs, two cereal bowls, and a colander had appeared on the kitchen table. A cast iron skillet sat on the stove, as if waiting to be filled with peppers and onions.

Ellen stared at them for a moment, then took one of the bowls and fixed herself some cereal.

* * *

No matter how many times she yells at him, Ash keeps on leaving his dirty dishes in his room, or depositing them in a teetering tower _next_ to the sink and its dishpan full of suds.

Jo used do the same thing. So did Bill.

"Goddamn pain-in-the-ass genius..." It would be easier to replace some of these dishes than wash them.

"Probably won't wipe his own ass unless he's told..."

Much as she'd like to kill him sometimes, at least Ash is still around to make a mess, Ellen thinks as she scrubs at dried-on cereal and scrapes pizza crusts into the trash.

"I swear, that boy was raised by hyenas."

She doesn't know much about how Ash _was_ raised, only that he came here searching for answers to what happened to his friend. Ellen's still amazed at how much Ash was able to piece together on his own, once Caleb gave him a few suggestions of where and how to start looking.

Ash is still looking, even after he's found his own answers, and there are many who are thankful for it. In the past few weeks alone, he's found things for Diana that even _she_ didn't know about werewolves. He's gotten a bead on where Gordon is these days, so Ellen can be sure to tell the Winchester boys to steer well clear of him. From the sound of things the past few days, Ash might even have a lead on something _really_ big, but he's being close-mouthed about it, for a change.

Ellen raises an eyebrow when he comes out of his room, trying to look all smug but only succeeding in looking as if he's had way to much coffee. She asks him if he could walk out to get the mail, but he's waiting for a phone call, he says.

So, Ellen heads out, and it works out just as well that she does, because there's a padded envelope waiting for her out there, with it's little bit of blue and silver.

Sometimes, she's tempted to ask Ash what his story _really_ is, but she's fairly sure that all she'd get would be a nicely camouflaged version of the truth.

At least the boy's got a place to be _now_ , dirty dishes and all.


	2. Chapter 2

Ellen has lived in a quite a few places throughout the years. She's not entirely sure which of them is the first place she called 'home.'

There was the ugly brick house outside of Philadelphia, where she spent much of her childhood, but that wasn't it. It was just a place where they were staying only until her father got tenure. Later, it was only until Janis got out of the hospital (and then they'd find a wonderful new place to live, just the three of them). Until Nebraska, Ellen had lived longer in that house than she had anywhere else, but she can't recall ever telling anyone she came from Philly.

Before that, there was the house in Indiana they'd shared with four of Dad and Janis's friends, but that wasn't it, either. It had been chaotic, and loud, with too many 'house rules' that no one ever seemed to follow. Janis always hated it, but they didn't leave until Ellen's father decided he couldn't get any writing done in all the chaos.

Then there was the apartment in California back when her father was still in school, but Ellen doesn't remember much about California other than the denim beanbag chair where Janis would park Ellen while she and her friends painted sign after sign (Bill would later laugh his head off when Ellen explained to him that the first letters she'd learned to recognize were L, B, and J).

About two years after she'd started learning the hunting business, once Miss Sylvia was too old and frail to look after her, she'd gone to stay with Bud Corrigan and his wife for a while, helping by doing the kind of legwork Bud couldn't since he'd lost most of a foot to diabetes. 

She never did ask how Bud and Katie got into hunting, but she figured the fact that they had a spare room all set up for a youngish girl (one just a little prissier than Ellen, perhaps, but who liked many of the same books) said all that really needed to be said.

There weren't many hunters left like Bud, even back then. By the time Ellen met him, he didn't venture more than a half-day's drive from home, and only when there was good cause. Their long drives became a time for Bud to tell her every thing he'd learned over the past twenty years, from how to draw a Devil's Trap (illustrated on a paper placemat that Ellen still had in her cigar box) to how hunting wasn't something you could just put back down once you picked it up.

From Katie, she learned how a person could keep on _living_ while you hunted, no matter what happened to you. It was why she could call Tessa Corrigan's old room or Bobby Singer's couch or the women's shelter run by Jim Murphy's church 'home' and not have the word come out of her mouth all warped and dripping with acid. 

Maybe that's why, until she and Bill finally settled at the Roadhouse, she always told people she'd come from Massachusetts. The faint accent she'd picked up from her two years with Miss Sylvia and her three with Bud and Katie was chewed up and spit out by the Midwest long ago, but even now, even after she's called the Roadhouse home for nearly half her life, Massachusetts is still where she is _from_. 

She remembers sitting by the fire in Miss Sylvia's cottage, wrapped up in a down comforter, listening to the steady hush of the rain pelting against the windows and finally feeling _safe_ for the first time in a very, very long time.

Funny, how some of her worst nightmares and some of her best memories come from the same place.

* * *

The ghosts kept up with their game of moving things--always carefully, so that nothing ever broke or chipped or scuffed--and moved on to opening and closing doors at random. Ellen simply kept up with putting things back, or re-opening or re-closing doors as needed. One time, she closed the same door five times in one day, and had the distinct feeling that something was laughing at her. No, _with_ her.

She didn't mind. It was something to do, and she didn't think to worry about it until early August. Going upstairs and finding her books stacked up in a pyramid was no different than coming back from a day at the beach and seeing the stray clumps of grass and snips of privet that said Professor Jameson's lawn service had been and gone. Sometimes, she got the feeling that the ghost or ghosts enjoyed having someone to play with.

Sometimes, when she couldn't stop thinking about Janis, she thought it was only her father being clever.

The day she was first _made_ to worry about it, there was nothing to eat in the house, as usual. When Ellen went upstairs to announce that she was hungry, her father fished out his wallet, handed her some money, and told her to go into town. "Be back by seven, though. There's a pot-luck at the Whitings, and there's lots of people I'll want to meet there."

She wasn't surprised when his instructions trailed off into a ramble about how he needed to have this finished in time, and god, it just wasn't flowing, and people were going to _be_ there... He was so focused on the spiral notebook propped on his knees and all its scratched-out lines that he didn't even notice he'd just given her a twenty dollar bill. Ellen paused, watching him scowl his way through the next line, and in the end she quietly folded the bill into a tidy little square and tucked it into her change purse.

On her way out, she ran a finger through the dust on the station wagon, leaving a dark brown trail through the light brown. Maybe she should go back and interrupt her father to tell him he'd given her too much money--easily three week's worth, all at once.

Then again, if she was careful with it, she wouldn't have to bother him again for at least another week. He'd been getting more and more caught up in his work lately, and when he wasn't lost in his writing or sitting staring red-eyed into nothing and acting like she wasn't there, he was eager as a puppy, practically dragging her off on some wild 'adventure' or another whether she wanted to or not. Besides, it wasn't like he kept track of where the money went, anyway. 

The words in her mind sounded an awful lot like Janis.

As she made the long walk down into town, Ellen thought how she might use the money. Maybe she should use some of it to buy a cake or pie or something because otherwise they'd have nothing to bring to the potluck. Her father had snapped at her when she asked about it that morning, showing a rare flash of temper. He apologized, of course, then told her not to worry about it. 

Still, the thought of showing up empty handed and eating everyone else's food burned worse than her empty belly. She could go to the bakery and get a pie, she decided, and then maybe she could take the bus out to State Beach or maybe out to Dutcher's Dock and buy herself a bag of fried clams. No, she'd get the clams first, and then the pie. Her stomach rumbled, and she punched it lightly, telling it to shut up.

When the trees parted, she would sneak a glimpse to the left, down the tumbling meadows and out towards the ocean far below. It was too bright to look for long, but when she saw the ferry chugging out she made herself track its progress for as long as she could. She'd stopped by the Steamship Authority to use the restrooms plenty of times that summer, and she'd always stopped to look at the ferry schedules. Next to it was another schedule, one that showed what time the buses left for Boston. By August, she had both schedules memorized, but she still looked at them.

Twenty dollars could get her there, easily. She wouldn't do it--she didn't even know what she would _do_ if she went to Boston--but she held on tight to the thought as she watched the ferry turn and shrink as it ambled along towards the Cape.

It occurred to her then that she couldn't leave the island anyway, at least not until the ferry came back. She didn't know where she wanted to go, but she still didn't like that she couldn't go there if she did. And when the ferry _did_ come back, who's to say someone wouldn't try to stop a little girl who was so obviously boarding all by herself?

 _All by herself_. And her father would be sad and upset and trying to pretend that he wasn't. Ellen stopped and looked over her shoulder, back up the road, and her breath caught tight in her chest. She stood there for a while, and the sound of the ocean seemed to do her breathing for her. There were times she missed her father almost as much as she missed Janis, but going back there right now would only make her miss him more.

When she turned to set off back down the hill, she now saw someone coming up the other way. A bent, bird-boned old woman in seersucker shorts and a tidy white polo waved hello from so far away that Ellen knew the woman must have thought she was waving to some other girl. Not knowing what else to do, Ellen raised her hand and waved back because that's what you did when people waved to you.

"Good morning," the woman said as they came within speaking distance of each other. Ellen didn't return the greeting right away, and the woman kept on talking. "You're the little girl who's staying in the Jameson place, aren't you?"

It was all said with good cheer, but Ellen froze in place, wondering how this woman knew about her and feeling the weight of that twenty like a stone in her change purse.

"Yes'm."

The old woman smiled, which made her face seem even more wrinkled. "I heard down at the bookstore that someone else was staying there this summer. It's such a lovely place, isn't it?"

Ellen nodded and wondered how long the woman would keep her there, talking. She didn't want to be impolite, but she wanted her lunch.

"I've never seen a collection of old porcelain quite like the Jamesons have, not outside of a museum." It was shaping up to be nothing but small talk, the kind Ellen had to put up with when her father dragged her to parties. Ellen was so used to tuning it out that she almost missed it when the woman asked, in the same tones people used to ask if Ellen was having a nice summer on the island, "Have the ghosts started moving it around yet?"

Ellen drew in a sharp hiss of breath between her teeth, but anything else she or the woman might have said was knocked off track when her stomach rumbled, loudly.

"Oh, dear." The woman gave Ellen a sharp once-over from her too-small sandals up to her faded tie-dye shirt and crooked barrettes. "I _did_ hear you need some looking after, young lady. Seems I heard right." 

The broad vowels and dropped Rs had already become familiar to Ellen over the past two months, but for the first time it was starting to sound comforting. "Let's see about getting you a decent meal before we do anything else."

* * *

The Roadhouse isn't a restaurant, but Ellen's been known to feed passers-through from time to time. She doesn't run a charity, but she'll do what's needed, when it's needed.

Ellen isn't a bad cook, but she's by no means an excellent one, either. She's good at cooking the sort of things that can be expanded to feed two or three extra guests by tossing in a can of tomatoes or several handsful of macaroni, or that can be doled out in smaller portions if there's a need to stretch. They're the sort of meals that can also be frozen with little harm if people fail to show up for a meal without warning.

Bill would always eat whatever she served with great relish, quickly and quietly, especially when he'd come back from a hunt. In her more teasing moods, she responded to Bill's compliments that living on C Rations for a few years must have blasted his taste buds to hell and gone.

Jo wasn't as enthusiastic about her mother's cooking, but she didn't complain, not unless broccoli or cream of mushroom soup were involved. Jo's a better cook than Ellen is, to tell the truth. She's almost as good of a shot, too. Those are just two of the many things Ellen regrets Bill never lived to see. They're also two of the few things that don't worry her about Jo being out on her own. When it comes to the everyday things, Jo can take care of herself.

Ellen hopes Jo doesn't think that because she's capable in a few things that she's capable in all things. 

Lately, Ellen's been daydreaming about what she'll do when Jo has come home and they've worked through all the yelling and tears and sorries--because there'll be plenty of that, oh yes there will. Maybe she'll make the spaghetti sauce that Jo always likes. Or maybe she'll make the hour and ten round-trip to pick up a pizza and a couple of movies the way they always did when they had something to celebrate.

* * *

Miss Sylvia--the old woman introduced herself as Sylvia Holmes, and within a week Ellen had picked up the 'Miss Sylvia' from other year-round residents--insisted on walking back into town with Ellen and treating her to lunch. Ellen wasn't so sure about that, but she _was_ hungry. Then, when they reached town, the bookstore owner waved hello to Miss Sylvia through the window, and that sealed the deal. 

They ate at a small, self-styled 'bistro' that was half a story up from street level, where they could peer down on the tourists through lacy half-curtains. Miss Sylvia studied the menu carefully, tilting her head back to peer through glasses that had slid down to the end of her nose. "I imagine this place won't be here next summer. Shame." 

Ellen had quickly scoured the menu for 'fish and chips' and, having verified its presence, put the menu down in favor of watching the people crowding the sidewalk. Miss Sylvia's remark caught her off guard.

"Vineyard Haven?" she said, thinking Miss Sylvia meant the whole town and all its summer people.

Miss Sylvia shook her head slightly, and did Ellen the favor of not laughing. She continued to peruse the menu, reading each and every item even though she'd already declared she was going to have the Waldorf salad. "This restaurant. Half the town shuts down come Labor Day, and half the businesses along Main Street never re-open come spring. It's just the way it is, around here. Past September twenty-one, you'll find more ghosts than living people on this island."

"Like the ones where I'm staying," Ellen said, proud to be in the know. It made her feel like this place was _hers_ in some way. "The ones that move things around."

"Yes."

Miss Sylvia had put down the menu, and was now looking at Ellen, again scrutinizing her as if looking for fault.

"Ed and Sarah Jameson have been coming here every summer since fifty-nine."

Ellen nodded. Her father didn't exactly work for Professor Jameson, but he'd gotten her father a job that was supposed to start that fall. Or something like that. Ellen wasn't quite sure why they'd gotten to use the Professor's house that summer, but her father kept on saying it was the start of good things for them, and that the universe _owed_ them good things after what they'd been through.

"They're as proud of those ghosts as if they're their own ancestors, but that said, the Jamesons do leave right before Labor Day, every year, without fail. Of course, that's because he's got to get back to Tufts before the fall semester starts, and Sarah Jameson won't dare miss the start of the social season."

Ellen got the feeling that Miss Sylvia was about to start talking _around_ something, the way her father always managed to avoid saying exactly why Janis was in the hospital or would change the subject when Ellen asked when she could go visit.

But instead of talking around the matter, Miss Sylvia walked right up to it and knocked on the front door. "I've heard stories from previous owners--I played there as a girl, when they and their grandchildren came up for the summer." She craned her head to look out the window, and at the summer people in their short sleeves and sunburns. "The ghosts play games in the summer. You've seen it, the way they'll put things where they don't belong. In the fall though, they're not as playful. If no one is around, they'll leave things alone, but if you stay more than a few days into September, they'll start trying to drive you out."

Ellen played with her napkin for a moment, folding it and unfolding it. She knew that they were going to leave in a few weeks, but to think of it like that, to think that they weren't _wanted_...

"Why?"

Miss Sylvia looked out at the logjam of people that had all but stopped any motion on the sidewalk. "Probably the same reason why I look forward to summer and all its goings-on, but by the time it's over, I'm ready for everyone to get on that ferry and never come back."

"I mean, why are you telling me this?" Ellen tried hard not to sound like she was sassing, but she wasn't sure if she'd succeeded. Free fish and chips was all well and good, but she was starting to wish she'd lied and said she wasn't the little girl who was staying at the Jameson place.

Miss Sylvia raised an eyebrow, and after the waitress came to take their order, all she had to say on the matter was that she wanted to be sure that Ellen knew she was safe in the old house. "Just so long as it's summer."

This time, when Ellen got the feeling there was more to be heard on the matter, Miss Sylvia left it alone. The conversation moved on from the Jameson ghosts to tales of a haunted piano in Edgartown, or the ghost of a Wampanoag woman who appeared only to people who were grieving and who brought them a sort of calm, or a ghostly visitor who helped water down a widow's roof and keep it from going up in one of the fires that had ravaged Main Street. 

She also asked about Ellen's father, but something about the way she asked made Ellen think that Miss Sylvia already knew all about him and was just checking her facts. Then, without knowing how it happened, they were talking about Ellen's favorite books and Miss Sylvia named book after book after book she thought Ellen might like.

* * *

The private rooms at the back of the roadhouse are filled with keepsakes. Photographs, of course, some out and some in shoeboxes. Jo's dolls and a scrapbook filled with her schoolwork and report cards. A set of hand-thrown mugs Diana brought her from New Mexico. The bigger-than-god wardrobe she and Bill had trucked down from Bobby's place when she was seven months pregnant. 

All of that is stuff she and Bill (and then later, she alone) got once they settled at the Roadhouse. While they were living on the road--apart and then together--it was too risky to try to hang on to anything that they didn't need for the job or for day-to-day living. Anything that they wanted to keep but didn't absolutely need was in storage. Bill had a storage locker north of St. Louis. Ellen had the Corrigan's cellar.

Still, there were a few things that they had with them, that weren't necessary in the keeping themselves alive sense but were vital when it came to _living_.

Bill had an envelope full of sketches on cardboard and brown paper bag--pictures of him and his war buddies, a few boats, a few landscapes. The scrap of cardboard with a charcoal sketch of Bill in his tigerstripe fatigues still hangs in their bedroom. It looks more like Bill than any photograph of him ever could.

Ellen had her cigar box. Even now, she occasionally thinks about emptying it into an album or scrapbook, but it's been easier just to keep adding things to it over the years. Jo's postcards are the latest addition.

It barely closes, now.

Once Ellen knew she was at the Roadhouse to stay, she sent Bud and Katie a money order and her shipping address. Katie, of course, went overboard. She sent not just Ellen's things but a few paraffin-topped jars of beach plum jelly and a box of things for the baby-to-be. Ellen was pleased, but not surprised; that's just how Katie was.

The surprise came when Ellen sat crosslegged in front of the low shelves in the bedroom, putting all of her old paperbacks and precious few hardcovers in their new home. She was about to put one of the hardcovers on the shelf, then stopped, realizing that it was the copy of _I Capture the Castle_ she'd read no less than three times while she was at the Corrigans. It was one of Tessa's books; her name was right there on the flyleaf in delicate Catholic school script. Ellen knew damn well she hadn't packed it away with her own things when she took to the road. She was more careful than that.

One of the nice things about being pregnant was that she had something to blame tears on if she needed to.

A few days after Jo left, Ellen noticed a few gaps in the bookshelf, books leaning at an angle where they should have been standing upright. _I Capture the Castle_ was gone. So was Ellen's copy of _Little Women_ and Jo's copy of _Make Way for Ducklings_. Somehow, Ellen can't bring herself to be as angry about this as she should.

* * *

After lunch, she and Miss Sylvia walked back up to the bookstore. Miss Sylvia had an order to pick up, and Ellen figured she could spend the money she didn't spend on lunch on one of the books Miss Sylvia had recommended. Miss Sylvia apologized for not offering Ellen a ride back up to the Jameson place, but she'd found a good parking spot and still had errands to run in town. Once in the bookstore, however, they walked in and borrowed a pen and a paper bookmark from the owner. Miss Sylvia wrote her number down on the back of the bright purple bookmark. The numbers were very spiky but very neat.

"Call me if you would like to talk about the ghosts, or if you'd like to meet for lunch again." It wasn't one of those offers that meant nothing, like the people who told her father they'd love to read what he'd written.

Ellen told Miss Sylvia she'd like that, very much, and that she _would_ call. She meant it, too. She folded the bookmark in careful thirds, and put it inside her change purse. 

Two hours later, when she came up to the cash register with both _The Witch of Blackbird Pond_ and _Flambards_ , she noticed that the man behind the counter greeted her with a more casual cheer than before, stopping to comment that if Miss Sylvia had recommended the books, Ellen was sure to like them. He also told her to tell him what she thought of the books she just bought, and he'd point her towards some more.

Ellen wasn't sure why, but that put her in the kind of good mood she couldn't remember having since just before Christmas. She ran one more errand, then walked all the way back home.

When she got back to the house, she looked up, as she was in the habit of doing. As she walked up to the front door, the reflections in one of the upmost windows shifted so that she could imagine people moving around up there. It no longer startled her, but what did make her jump was the strong "No!" that blasted from up above, louder than the roar of the ocean.

It was her father. Ellen stood quiet, heart hammering in her chest. His voice carried down through an upstairs window as he argued with someone. "You promised... no, that's not how I remember it. You don't make that kind of offer and then take it back like that. I have a _child,_ you fucking asshole!" She held her breath at the enormity of _those_ words coming out of her father's mouth. "She's depending on me. You can't--"

He said even more words Ellen wasn't allowed to use and then she heard a clunk and a dull ring as he slammed down the phone.

By the time she made it inside, being sure to loudly yell that she was home as she walked upstairs to the study, he was all smiles again. Her heart was racing and she felt so guilty about everything that she told him about the twenty. He just nodded and said not to worry about it-- _it's okay, it's okay_. He also said not to worry about it when she told him she'd bought a pie for tonight, or when she said she bought two books with the money.

_It's okay, it's okay. Don't cry, all right? No one's mad, Nelly-belle. No one's upset._

She decided not to tell him about the sandwich she'd bought in case he got lost in his work and forgot about the potluck, but he wouldn't have noticed if she did. Instead, he just told her to go read her book (and how did she like _The Martian Chronicles_ so far?) and come get him when it was time to leave, not that she knew when that was. He shut the study door gently in her face, but not ten seconds after it closed she could hear the muffled smack and thump of things being slammed around.

When she walked back through the Jameson's living room, she noticed that the checkers had been set up on the old gaming table. Right there, right in front of her eyes, one of black's men moved out a square. Ellen thought about it for just a second or two, then touched one of white's pieces. It was much colder than it should have been. She almost, but didn't, yank her hand right back.

"Miss Sylvia says I'm supposed to be careful, but as long as it's summer, I should be okay," she said, looking into the empty space on the other side of the board. She slid the checker up and over a square. "So _this_ is okay, right? You're not mad at us yet?"

Nothing happened, but when she came back in after getting a glass of water, another black piece had been moved.

She and the ghost played checkers all afternoon.

* * *

It wasn't until they'd been together for a little over three years that Bill finally admitted he often wondered if there were ways to deal with ghosts other than just salting and burning, driving them out and moving them on. 

"It'd depend on the ghost, of course, but there's times I wonder if maybe it's best just to give it what it wants."

The Roadhouse had closed early for the evening, doors locked and lights out while the Harvelles sat in the one back room they'd blocked off as a living room of sorts. Bill was just home from a hunt, and Ellen felt no guilt about shutting down. If someone needed them that badly, they'd come around back and knock.

"That doesn't sound safe... no, Jo honey, don't touch that, that's Daddy's knife--Bill, for God's sake put that where she can't get at it. Here honey, here's Mommy's keys instead." She unclipped the keys from her belt loop and dangled them in front of Jo's eyes, the flash of lamplight on cheap metal distracting her while Bill took his jackknife and put it up on the end table. "Like I was saying, Bill, giving a ghost what it thinks it wants doesn't sound like a good idea, and... oh, don't tell me you've _tried_ it."

Bill shrugged, and didn't answer at first. The two of them were sitting on the floor, backs leaning up against the front of the couch while Jo crawled around on the rug, exploring and playing with everything but the toys they'd bought especially for her.

"Bill..." 

"Hm? Sorry. No, _I_ haven't." Jo banged the keys against the floor over and over, talking brightly to herself in a loud string of _bababababababa_. Bill couldn't take his eyes off of her. "Just thinking, that's all."

"About what?" Ellen knew better than to ignore matters regarding ghosts, even if it was brought up as an aside. And from the way he was looking at Jo, it was something about their baby that triggered the thought, and so she was doubly on the alert.

Bill didn't speak for a bit, but Ellen knew him well enough to know his silence wasn't a refusal to answer. He was just taking his time getting his words together. That meant something, given how he'd otherwise go right into elaborate stories at the drop of a hat.

"You know I dealt with my first ghost in-country, right? Back in seventy-three?"

Ellen nodded. Bill had told her the story, but only a few times, and with such economy she could easily guess how much he wasn't telling her. She'd gotten good at that, and he knew it, too. He first told her the story about a year after they'd met, back when she was beginning to suspect he had a thing for her and she was still figuring out if she wanted to trust him or not.

Three of the men in his unit had died messily in their own tents. Beyond that, she didn't know any details other than their names, and the fact that Bill avoided mentioning how he figured out why the nurse's ghost had targeted _those_ men and left their buddies unharmed even though they were sleeping only a few feet away. She also knew that whenever Bill mentioned the fourth man--the one whose throat was about to be cut when Bill and his friend Harry torched _all_ of the body bags about to be choppered out since they didn't have time to find out which one contained the nurse--Bill always casually followed up the story of how they'd saved him with the fact that the guy'd been lost to friendly fire a few days later. 

When he'd told it the first time, he'd kept his eyes on her face, making sure she was filling in the missing bits properly and anxiously watching to see how she'd react.

She'd poured him another drink and asked him how much trouble he and Harry had gotten into for desecrating the bodies. And that was it.

"That was the first ghost _I_ dealt with," he said as he watched Jo roll over on her back and try to shove Ellen's keys in her mouth. "But I got to see someone else deal with another one, not long before that."

It was something like a poltergeist, from the sound of it. One that terrorized not just a single house, but an entire village next to where Bill's unit was stationed.

"Couple of the guys thought they'd finally lost it. Couple others thought it was just mind games, and wanted to go into town find the VC who were pulling all this shit and trying to drive us bugfuck. Harry, though, Harry seemed to know what was going on, and one night I heard him getting into it with the guy who was our translator. Harry was going on about graves and burning, and I had no idea what the hell was going on. Harry... see, Harry was a real level-headed guy, even though it turned out he believed in ghosties and ghoulies all sorts of other crazy shit that couldn't possibly exist." This last was said with a slight wink and nod. 

Ellen punched him in the shoulder, because that's what she did when Bill's humor got the better of a serious moment. 

"Eventually, it seemed they came to some sort of agreement and they headed into the village proper."

"And you followed them." Honestly, Bill was worse than a cat when it came to sticking his nose in things.

Bill nodded. "I followed them. I wasn't sneaky about it. Harry said I may as well come along, but not to expect to like what I saw. Well, I figured that by then, I'd seen or at least heard about the worst that could be seen. But that was nothing like having more and more rocks and sticks and dog crap flung at us as we got closer to whatever it was."

The child's grave, Ellen thought. Most poltergeists were children, after all.

"What I wasn't expecting was the crying. It came from everywhere. Just everywhere. Even from the ground. This awful, awful crying, like a baby that was alone and abandoned and angry and scared all at once."

Jo babbled contentedly around her mouthful of keys. Ellen reached over and rested a hand on Bill's leg. She knew what would come next, and waited for him to tell her about small bones being put to the fire.

"The translator took us to this little shrine. The thing had been shot to hell and gone, probably by some of the guys. There were bits of rotten fruit and melted candy and broken glass and pottery all over the place. Harry kept going on about bones and salt and so on--you know what he was getting at, El--but the translator just shushed him and walked up right to the temple. A rock got him on the side of the head, but he kept on walking right up to that little shrine. I didn't catch what he said--I know a little Vietnamese, but not that much--and he put a little candy bar up on what was left of the shrine." 

Bill shook his head, and although he was still looking at Jo he was seeing something else. His voice had become almost dreamy, and even though the story wasn't a happy one, it wasn't quite _un_ happy, either. "And then he pulled a mirror out of his pocket and put it up there. And then a fancy little comb."

Jo rolled back onto her hands and knees, and held out the keys to Ellen with an imperious "ba!" Ellen reached out and pulled Jo into her lap. Jo fussed a little bit, but settled down contentedly enough by the time Bill was ready to resume his story.

"Damnedest thing, but the crying started to die down. Not cutting off, the way it would've if Harry'd gotten his way--you know how it goes. Anyhow, the crying just gradually got softer and less angry, kind of like how Jo does when she stops being cranky about her nap once she figures out she really _is_ tired. The translator said that these shrines were built to hold the souls of dead children, and that it was important for the shrines to be well-kept and for the children to be brought gifts from time to time."

After that, he said, Harry took him back to the local tavern and they both got very, very drunk while Harry told him about _all_ kinds of crazy shit, stuff that went well beyond shrines and candy and dead kids who wouldn't stay dead.

"Never did see the world the same after that. And I never did meet another ghost that could be stopped just by giving it a toy and a bit of chocolate." Bill shrugged. "Thought things might get back to normal when I got back to the States, but I guess I left normal behind for good back then."

Ellen didn't say anything. She just thought about how it was always Bill who took it the hardest when they had to deal with a child ghost.

"The crying, though. That's the bit I'll always remember," Bill said. He was trying hard to keep the catch out of his voice. "And I'll always remember what the translator said about the children and how they were always so angry when their homes were disturbed. Just so, so angry."

* * *

When Ellen comes back out from the kitchen, the hunters who were about to start the brawl are long gone. Her heart's still racing, but she's stopped shaking.

"For a minute there, I though you were going to pull out the shotgun," Ash says. He's still twitchy as hell, and he's keeping within lunging distance of the phone. Has been all day, and there's no trace of the smugness he'd tried to put on earlier. Whatever he was so proud of is now sitting heavy on his shoulders.

"Everyone's jumpy, these days," she says. 

_She's_ jumpy, and not just because of what just happened. In a way, she's been like this ever since Jo took off, but that's to be expected. It's like it was when Bill was gone hunting, only worse.

But that fight... she honestly thought Wally was going to pull a gun on Mac, she really, truly did. The hunters all seem to know that something is up, that something big is about to go down, and everyone's on edge. Problem is, some folks handle 'on edge' a lot better than others.

It scares her more than she wants to admit that Ash is all wound up about something. All he'll say, when she presses, is that he's waiting for a call, and hey, he put something in the safe and is that all right? He's not acting like Ash, and that gets to her the way the prospect of having Mac Martin's brains spattered over her floor can't quite match. She'll press him a bit more, but not just yet. It can wait an hour or two.

She's able to keep her hand steady as she pours herself a drink. It's a little early for whiskey, but she figures she deserves it. It's not the numbing she needs as much as the burn down her throat. She knocks half a shot back in one quick gulp, and it's as good as slapping herself back to her senses. There's part of her that wants more than just half a shot, but she's eyeing her keys, over on their nail, and she's thinking she might need to head out for a bit. 

The Roadhouse just doesn't feel safe right now, but her wanting to leave has nothing to do with her own safety.

She just hates being in this place when it doesn't feel like _home_.

* * *

Three days after she first met Miss Sylvia, Ellen unfolded the purple bookmark. She carefully lifted the receiver off the phone so it wouldn't make a click. She listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, as if not entirely sure that she didn't hear her father yelling at someone.

He'd been on the phone a lot, the past few days. And when he wasn't on the phone, he was almost desperate to go to this party or that, bringing his poems and his short stories with him to each and every one.

It was a relief when he was gone, and she could convince him not to take her along. Last night at dinner, though, he smiled too much and outright lied when she asked him who he was shouting at all the time.

"I wasn't shouting, Nelly-belle. Don't be silly."

Ellen wished Janis was there to call him an idiot, and to cuff him lightly on the back of the head. It was stupid of her, and maybe a little mean, but when he pointed out that the ghosts had stacked up all of Mrs. Jameson's needlepoint cushions on the coffee table, Ellen asked him what he thought Janis would have thought about the ghosts.

"Don't dwell on that, sweetie." He smiled, but his eyes were either mad or sad--Ellen couldn't tell. She flinched back when he reached out to ruffle her hair, but he either didn't notice or pretended not to. "We both miss her, but we need to focus on the happy times we're going to have together, okay? We're living in a great house on a beautiful island, and guess what, Nelly-belle--I've finally got an idea for a novel. May as well start working on it, since I've met all kinds of people here who should be able to help me get it published once it's done."

He wouldn't tell her what it was about or offer to read her what he'd written, teasing her about it the way he would tease her about what she was going to get for Christmas or her birthday. No, not quite like that. This was more like he didn't _know_ what he was going to give her for her birthday, because he'd forgotten all about it until Janis reminded him.

She used to _like_ spending time with her father. At last, that's how she remembered it. But then, those times were spent with her father-and-Janis.

"Can you come get me?" she whispered when Miss Sylvia answered the phone. "I'm scared."

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone, and an _it's only August_ that Ellen probably wasn't meant to hear. Then, an almost believably calm, "Is it the ghosts, Ellen?"

She had to think about that for a second. "No."

As she walked quietly to the front door, the checkers clattered into place on the gaming table. Ellen shushed the ghosts. "Later. I'll play with you _later_ ," she whispered. She hurried the rest of the way to the door, not sure what she'd do if the ghosts decided they didn't want her to leave.

She walked down towards town, and she made it about halfway there when Miss Sylvia drove up and pulled over so Ellen could get in.

Miss Sylvia's house was far inland, out past the Grange Hall and so far from the water you'd never know you were on an island. Ellen told her about the phone calls and the book, and her father's smiles. She wasn't ready to talk about Janis just yet. Miss Sylvia nodded in recognition when Ellen named some of the people her father had met on the island and some of the parties and gatherings he'd begged invites to, but Ellen couldn't tell if it was good recognition or bad. She simply nodded and went _mmm-hmm_ from time to time as they drove through scrub oak and past mossy rock walls.

The hills here were little rolls of up and down, not like the big upsweep from Vineyard Haven up to where the Jameson's place and the West Chop light were. Ellen saw sheep and cows out in the fields, and big gray barns and little red barns. The only sign they were anywhere near an ocean was when a gull floated by, following a thermal to God-knew-where.

Miss Sylvia's house was surrounded by old cedars and was set well back from the road. Its shingles were more light brown than gray, and the doors and shutters had been painted bright red rather than the green or white Ellen had quickly learned to peg as 'normal.'

"It's something my grandfather learned when he was in China," Miss Sylvia said as they walked up to the house. The house was one of the kind where the main floor was a little bit up from the ground, and you had to walk up to a small porch to get to the front door. As they walked up the path from the drive, Miss Sylvia pointed out various plants, pointing at and naming them so quickly Ellen couldn't follow. "Mints, all kinds. Sage, chamomile, dianthus, lavender, thyme... all good for purification, if not protection, taken on their own." As she passed it, she lightly backhanded a holly tree that grew right up to the flagstone path. It rustled, and a startled wren shot out in search of other shelter. " _That's_ for protection. And the birds love it in the winter."

When they were up on the porch, Ellen looked down at the front garden. What had looked like just a whole bunch of plants (mostly green things, very few flowers) took on a distinct pattern. It was sort of like a star, with lines running between the points and criss-crossing themselves

"What's that for?" Ellen asked. She'd also noticed that several rocks had been placed here and there among the plants, mostly near the points and criss-crosses, and they had what looked like letters scrawled on them.

Miss Sylvia paused, hand still on the doorknob, and turned to look. She smiled, pleased at the question. "I'll tell you, but let's get inside. The mosquitoes are eating me to death. Oh, and try not to scuff the salt lines when you step over the threshold."

Ellen stepped carefully, and wondered why Miss Sylvia had salt spilled all inside her front door. Maybe she was trying to keep out ants.

* * *

Ellen checks the inventory of rock salt. Seeing the bags all lined up in the pantry always makes her feel a little better, even though Miss Sylvia always told her that sea salt--real sea salt from close by--worked a far sight better against evil things than salt you got from box or bag.

Unfortunately, Ellen lives in Nebraska and the local IGA isn't exactly known for carrying real sea salt in any kind of quantity at anything resembling a reasonable price. 

These days, though, salt doesn't seem like enough. Something big is coming, has been coming for a while. John's boys are in the thick of it, which means that Bobby'll likely be caught up in it as well. It's already killed Jim and Caleb. Steve, too, if she's reading the rumors right. Also, unless she misses her guess, whatever Ash is so het up about is tied into it all as well.

While she waits for the half-shot to work its way through her blood, Ellen checks the salt lines around her own rooms. She prefers not to go into Ash's room (the smell _alone_...) if she can help it, but he's assured her it's warded. Probably warded better than the rest of the place, if she wants to be honest about it.

She steps outside, and is almost disappointed not to smell a storm in the air. It's a clear, spring day, a little cool for the time of year. Gorgeous. Crisp. More like late September than the beginning of May. She shades her eyes and looks up. The few clouds are eye-watering white against sharp blue.

For the first time in a long time, she feels homesick. She wishes Bill was there. She also finds she hopes Jo stays well away, even though she misses her daughter to the point of being sick from it.

She lets the pang wash over her. It's almost pleasant, in a way. Then, the moment over, she checks on all the outside protections. The few plants she keeps--tomatoes, black-eyed susans, peppers--are planted up close to the back of the roadhouse and don't serve any purpose besides the obvious. There's not even an attempt to imitate Miss Sylvia's elaborate, organic wards or Katie Corrigan's tidy and fruitful kitchen garden.

There are, however, several carefully marked and carefully placed rocks set around the Roadhouse. Ellen checks each and every one, kicking dirt away from one, adjusting another slightly.

Next, she checks the dreamcatchers that Diana set up here and there in the scrub. Ellen's not sure how much use they are, but Diana insisted she take them. Still, she's relieved to see that all the threads are in place. Dingy and dew-soaked, yes, but perfectly intact.

She's done her due diligence, but her mind is still not quite settled as she'd like it to be. So, when she sees that they're running low on pretzels, she doesn't think twice about taking the excuse to get out of there for a little while.

A careless "Ash, I'm headin' out," as she lifts the keys off their nail, and she's on her way.

Simple as that.

Ash follows and waves to her from the door, and it's not until she's well on her way to Brewster that she wonders if he was waving goodbye or waving her back.

* * *

When Miss Sylvia dropped her off later that afternoon, Ellen groaned when she saw that the brown station wagon was still there. She didn't mean to be too obvious about it, but Ellen already knew that Miss Sylvia didn't miss much.

"If you want, Ellen, you can leave a note for your father and come stay at my place. If you want," Miss Sylvia said, so kind that it nearly broke Ellen's heart.

"I'll be okay," she said, but she didn't think Miss Sylvia believed her. 

"Call if you need me to come get you," Miss Sylvia said, so simply that it scared Ellen more than if she'd been insistent or anxious. "If you honestly feel you can't stay, head into town, and I'll meet up with you on the way."

She also insisted that Ellen take out her purple bookmark and copy down three other phone numbers. "Oliver Coombs, lovely gentleman from the reservation, does digging and other chores for me when I have need, and then there's Marilyn Tucker. She lives not far from here, just down by Lagoon Pond. You can walk there if you have to. She'll know how to keep you safe, and from more than just ghosts."

The last number was for a Bud Corrigan. "He's over on the mainland, and he doesn't get around much these days, but if you've got any questions about what the ghosts are doing and you can't get hold of me or Marilyn, he'll be able to help."

Ellen looked at the numbers for a long time, studying them, memorizing them. She figured they were meant to make her feel better, but somehow they didn't. It wasn't ghosts that bothered her, but she couldn't tell Miss Sylvia that. She instead promised she'd be okay, and that she'd put salt in front of her bedroom door and along her windowsill. The ghosts didn't bother her, and she was pretty sure Miss Sylvia knew that, but...

She couldn't stop the hitching breath that broke free. Once it was out, though, it was out, and so many other things came out with it. She was sobbing, and then Miss Sylvia had her bony, fragile arms around her. It was nothing like being held by Janis, but the frail chest and the too-crisp shirt that smelled of Dove soap and talcum powder felt as strong as a rock and as soft as a cloud. She tried to stop crying because if she didn't, her father would joke and provoke to get her to stop--he never figured out that she only stopped to make him shut up. But this was Miss Sylvia, and even though she'd only known Ellen a few days, she still held her, and rested her cheek on the top of Ellen's head and just let her cry and wail.

She hadn't told Miss Sylvia about Janis, but from the soft things that Miss Sylvia said as she held Ellen and stroked her back, Ellen figured she already knew about what happened. Maybe even more than Ellen herself did. 

Miss Sylvia didn't tell Ellen it was going to be okay, but she did let her cry until the crying turned to hiccups and then to mortified, nauseated silence.

"Call me if you have a need to," she said once more.

Ellen was starting to feel a little better, like something that had been wrapped tight around her chest had finally been loosened just a bit. "Yes'm."

Ellen hopped out of the car, and looked up at the third story windows out of habit. She nearly jumped straight in the air when her father flung open his study window and leaned out to wave at her.

"I _said_ don't do that!" she yelled. He was always scaring her like that, and it made her stomach hurt to look.

"You worry too much," he shouted back. "Come on inside and keep me company while I have my coffee. I want to read you what I've written."

"Okay!" Ellen actually smiled, for real. Him reading to her was one of the few things that hadn't changed. She didn't always understand what he wrote, but she liked his voice and she liked hearing things that no one else had heard before.

He ducked back inside and a reflection of someone who wasn't really there waved from the window next to his.

That night, as she listened to the ocean and told herself stories to help her fall asleep, Ellen wondered about the people who used to live in the house and who still acted like they belonged there. She wondered if maybe they'd let her stay through the fall if she asked nicely, but there'd be no point. They were leaving in a few weeks and that was that.


	3. Chapter 3

The Roadhouse used to belong to someone else, although there are hunters who claim it had been 'Harvelle's' all the way back to forever. Some are joking, others aren't. A few even said that Samuel Colt had passed through there, while he was working on that gun and building the world's largest Devil's Trap. These were mostly the same people who joked about Ellen teething on pool cues.

Truth was, before it was Harvelle's, it was just a plain old bar owned by a man named Casey Durant. If hunters ever passed through there, it was only by accident and in anonymity.

Ellen and Bill had only meant their stay to last a few days, maybe a week at most.

They were desperately low on cash, and they'd seen the 'Help Wanted' sign on their way to a Woman in White outside of Brewster. Ellen figured she'd earn a few days wages, plus tips, while Bill took care of what should be an easy case. 

But then the Woman in White tossed Bill off a bridge, breaking his leg in two places. Six months of recovery time meant six months of working behind a bar, and eventually word got around that there was a place where hunters could go to swap stories and compare notes. Then, Jo was on her way, and after that, Ellen wasn't about to pick up and leave. By then, she'd heard tales about this one hunter who was all but living out of his _car_ with his two little boys. That was not the life she wanted for her child, and she told Bill as much.

Besides, she found she'd gotten used to putting her clothes away in drawers, and knowing _exactly_ when the bedspread had last seen the inside of a washing machine.

From time to time, Bill got the itch to head back on the road, or he got a call from an old buddy who needed a hand. Ellen never stopped him from going, but she found it harder to maintain her temper when he was gone, especially when she had a toddler who always seemed half again as willful and fractious than normal when her daddy wasn't around to dote on her.

For her part, Ellen went on a few jobs of her own when she was feeling restless, or when the rumors of a haunt had too familiar a ring for her to ignore. 

Then, when Jo was four, she flew out to the east coast to help out Katie Corrigan for a couple of weeks after Bud passed away. In some ways, it was harder than any hunt, but Ellen would have cause to be grateful for time spent.

Other than that, though, they were mostly content to stay put. And when they left, they always came back. The Roadhouse was home. Still, up until the day he left on that last hunt, Bill continued to call it the longest temporary job in the history of mankind.

* * *

There was only a week and a half left in August, and still her father said nothing about when they were going to leave. Ellen only had a dollar eighty-five left of the twenty she'd taken, and she clung to those five quarters and six dimes with miserly fervor. Her father and Janis always used to have 'discussions' (never arguments) about money running out, and it always ended with Janis yelling and with her father apologizing over and over until Ellen wished he'd just shut up already.

She figured they'd probably leave right before it was time for her to start school, so it was no big deal. One morning, though, she walked into town and after a long internal debate, stopped in at the bakery to use one of the five remaining quarters on a muffin. The screen door and its bells clattered behind her and she exchanged a "good morning, Maggie," for the warm "good morning, Ellen," that made her feel somehow superior to the day-trippers and weekenders and run of the mill 'summer folk.'

She tried not to smile too much as Maggie asked if she'd have her 'usual.' She just nodded curtly and raised up on tip-toe to hand the quarter over and receive a dime back in return. If she was lucky, Miss Sylvia would stop in not long after to get a cup of coffee and the morning gossip. Then, if it wasn't too miserably hot, according to Miss Sylvia's rather erratic internal thermostat, they'd go sit on a bench down by the marina and watch the cars coming off and going on the ferry.

That morning, though, things didn't happen quite as planned.

She handed the quarter over, and this time Maggie paused before reaching into the case for a corn muffin.

"Your father stopped in the other day for a cup of coffee. I was surprised to hear him say you'd be starting school here in the fall."

So was Ellen. She hadn't heard a word of it, unless it was part of one of the conversations she half-heard through closed doors. Her father'd been on the phone a lot, lately. On the phone and worried. It knotted her stomach to think about it, but when she asked, her father would only smile and tell her not to worry, and hey, let's go to the beach--it'll be okay. There was no more talk about getting what he was owed.

It was just like Janis getting sick all over again. No one told her anything. No one talked to her. No one let her _know_.

All Ellen could do for a moment was stare. Maggie blushed and leaned down to get Ellen's muffin, even though the last thing Ellen wanted right now was a stupid _muffin_. She apologized for letting the cat out of the bag and told Ellen to tell her father that the people who owned the tavern would get back to him about doing a reading. 

"That's what the Edgartown bookstore people said back in July," Ellen pointed out. Maggie started to turn red again, but then she saw the look on Ellen's face and the blush turned to a wry, knowing smile.

"I can't blame him for trying," she said. " _I_ like his poems, for what it's worth."

Ellen smiled back, just a little. "So do I," she admitted. 

One of these days, her father would find a place where he could write all the time, or talk about writing, and they could stay in one place and not worry about money. At least, that's what she told herself. Most of the time, though, it sounded like just another story.

Where were they going to stay? Her father had said Professor Jameson would let them stay in the house all summer. He was out of the country or something, but her father never told Ellen any details. He'd also stopped talking about the job he was starting that fall. She also heard him up in the study, yelling at someone over the phone. Ellen was starting to worry about that, but she knew the only answer she'd get if she did ask was "don't worry."

Being told not to worry was almost enough to send her into a sheer panic.

* * *

Right now, the only thing that's really eating at her mind is Ash, and how secretive he's being. The rest of it is finally starting to settle. Still, she worries, and after picking up a few cartons of pretzels, Ellen decides she's owed something decadent after dealing with the morning's upset. 

So, instead of heading straight back to the roadhouse, she heads another ten miles out to her favorite diner. They got an espresso machine in a few years back, and they'll make her the kind of froofy coffee she loves but will never admit to drinking. These days, she doesn't even have to tell them to add another glug of caramel syrup to the thing. They know.

On her way out of the diner, she reaches into her jacket pocket for her keys and her fingers brush against the North Carolina magnet. She smiles, and she figures she'll tell Ash about it when she gets back. 

And then she'll make damn sure he tells her what's got him so het up. This is no time for secrets.

* * *

Bill wouldn't always volunteer what he'd done to get himself hurt, or what kind of jackassery had landed him in the drunk tank in Providence. 

If she asked him, though, he'd generally be straight with her. Early, early on he'd learned in no uncertain terms that Ellen did not like to be protected from so-called 'hard' truths.

Her father had tried to protect her when Janis was sick and then dying. Ellen never did find out what it was that killed her mother. Once, when she went in for a pre-natal checkup and couldn't check a single damned box about her family medical history, she wondered which of those blank boxes might wind up biting her or her baby in the ass one fine day.

Hell, even Miss Sylvia had tried to protect her, at first.

As for Ellen, she watched her daughter mooning over Dean Winchester for well over a month before she got up enough mad to tell Jo exactly who it was her father was working with when he died, and what happened to people who were fool enough to trust their lives to impetuous idiots.

When she saw the look on Jo's face as her castles came crashing down out of the sky, Ellen had one of the few flashes of empathy she had ever had for her poor, well-meaning idiot of a father.

* * *

"I have a few things I need to tell you about, Ellen." 

It was August twenty-ninth, and Ellen sat in Miss Sylvia's parlor, nearly lost in a huge, chintz-covered chair. She held her glass of lemonade carefully in both hands, and her toes only barely touched the floor. Miss Sylvia sat in a straight-backed chair, one she could get out of easily. She didn't look very comfortable.

"Is it the ghosts?" Things had been moving around more and more lately. Ellen's father had cussed up a storm when he found that his papers had been strewn all over the study. Later, he snapped at Ellen for leaving her books and sandals on the stairs where he could trip on them.

He believed in the ghosts, or said he did, but when a window was left open, soaking his bed with rain, he was faster to blame his own idiocy than playful ghosts.

Miss Sylvia didn't answer at first. "How much has your father told you about what is going on?"

Ellen shrugged. "He's writing a book."

"Oh, is he now?"

Ellen flinched at the sudden waspishness in Miss Sylvia's voice. 

"He hasn't said anything about that job of his, has he?" This time, Miss Sylvia sounded more tired than annoyed, and Ellen really didn't want to hear what she had to say next.

As the end of August drew near, father had been staying up in his study more and more. Ellen thought he slept up there. He'd also stopped insisting on taking her along to those parties with all those boring, snooty people. From the way he talked about how dull it would be for her, you'd think she hadn't been telling him that all summer long. He would talk about who he'd met, and who they promised they'd introduce him to, and what they thought of his writing and his ideas, but...

"No. He hasn't." Ellen's voice, like her body, was swallowed up by the chair. "He keeps saying it's gonna work out, that people keep promising something good's gonna happen."

Miss Sylvia took off her glasses, and covered her eyes for a moment, ropy hand trembling a little.

"What's wrong? Miss Sylvia, what is it?"

Ellen had only known her new friend for a few weeks, but she already trusted Miss Sylvia to tell her what was wrong. She wouldn't say 'don't worry about it' or 'it's okay.'

She didn't. She told Ellen how she knew most of the old families, and how many of her friends knew people in Boston or in Philadelphia, or who knew people who knew people.

"You see, Ellen, I had heard about you and your father weeks before I met you. I knew you were staying in the Jamesons' house while they were out of the county." She paused, and put her glasses back on. "I knew that you had lost your mother, and that there were people who worried about how your father was handling that--and you. I don't know exactly how Ed Jameson met your father, but I know Ed, and know that he's a generous man. He gave you a place to stay. He said he'd talk to some friends of his at Tufts and, well, _see_ if there was a possibility of an opening as, oh, I don't know, a freshman composition or introductory literature class."

Ellen knew 'we'll see.' All too often it meant 'no.' She hugged her knees up to her chest, hiding her face.

"He keeps yelling at someone about promises," she said into her thighs. She looked up, though, when Miss Sylvia told her to please speak up and get her sandals off the upholstery. "He says he's not going to give up until he gets what he's promised. What does that mean? Does it mean he's not leaving the house? He's not telling me anything because he doesn't want me to worry. Doesn't he get that it only makes it worse?" At the end, her voice shot up to a strangled squeak, and she pitched forward, arms wrapped around her head to block out the light and to muffle the sound of her frantic breathing.

There was a long silence, and then Miss Sylvia spoke in a cold, calm voice. "I'll see what I can do. There's nothing I can do about the job, but I'll see what I can do to make the house safe until he gets his act... until things are more settled for the two of you. Meanwhile, do you think you can get your father to agree to leave the house if I can find you another place to stay?"

Ellen nodded, even though her head was still tucked under her arms.

"Ellen? Can you?"

"Yes." She sat up slowly. "Can the ghosts hurt us? Can I stay here?"

Miss Sylvia didn't answer for what felt like ten minutes but was probably only ten seconds. "If you're scared, or you think you're in danger, you can absolutely come here. As for the ghosts, I think they'll mostly stick to mischief. I do think, though, that the sooner we get you out of that house, Ellen, the better."

"Can _you_ say something to my father?" Miss Sylvia was older, and she knew the island. She sounded like she knew all those people her father was trying to impress. "He might listen if you said something, if you said he was in danger."

Again, there was that long but not long silence as Miss Sylvia seemed to pick through her words before letting them out of her mouth.

"Your father might be more likely to listen to his own daughter than a crazy old lady. You have to understand, Ellen, there's more people who don't believe in ghosts than do."

"He believes in them." Ellen couldn't look Miss Sylvia in the eye. Instead, she kept focused on the big bowl of beach glass on the coffee table. "He thinks they're neat. He says he wants to talk to them."

There was a sharp hiss of breath from Miss Sylvia. "Did he say about what?"

Ellen shook her head.

"Not good, not good..." Miss Sylvia tapped her fingers against her lips and she stared up at the ceiling as she thought. "They've always been harmless, but with the wrong sort of stimulus, the wrong sort of mind, the wrong circumstances... Oh, this could be tricky."

They'd only met a few times, but Ellen knew to wait while Miss Sylvia muttered her way to a conclusion. In a way, it was comforting to hear not just what Miss Sylvia was thinking, but _how_ she was thinking.

"Normally, I'd say let me find what's doing the haunting place and have Ollie Coombs burn it to bits. Unfortunately, we've never been able to find the what or who or how many when it comes to the Jameson place, and I'm not one to think we'll miraculously find the answer now. Doesn't mean I won't be looking, though."

Ellen nodded. Miss Sylvia thought a bit longer, silently this time.

"Talk to him, Ellen. Let him know that I have a spare bedroom here if he needs it."

The shift in what Miss Sylvia was offering was not lost on Ellen. Her eyes grew wide.

"Listen to me, Ellen--all you can do is try to talk to him. He may not listen, and if he doesn't, that is _not_ your fault. Talk to him, and tell me what happens, how he acts, what he says. It's early yet, and maybe we still have time. Talk to him today, tomorrow at the latest. Can you promise me that? Talk to him, and tell me what happens."

Ellen nodded and muttered a promise.

"Speak up, Ellen."

"I promise."

Miss Sylvia nodded in satisfaction then made her recite back the instructions she'd been given on what to do if the ghosts started scaring her too much.

When it was time to go home, Ellen had two amulets she'd made by herself (but all according to Miss Sylvia's instructions) and all sorts of instructions rattling around her head.

Miss Sylvia had offered to come inside with her when they got back to the Jamesons', and while it was tempting, Ellen said she'd rather be dropped off on the side of the road.

It was a good thing she did, because as soon as she stepped through the gap in the privet, Ellen could hear her father yelling and pleading with whoever it was on the other end of that phone.

"Please," came floating down from up above. "Please... please... please..."

It sounded like he was crying. It was worse than listening to him swear.

"Can't you please just let me talk to her?"

When Ellen went inside, she ignored the clattering checkers, and instead went to sit on her favorite landing, listening to the ocean and waiting for her father to get off the phone.

* * *

Ellen's phone rings just as she puts the keys in the ignition. She fumbles the coffee, swearing at the sudden heat scorching through to her knee.

"Ash? Everything all right? Mac and Wally didn't come back and start trouble, did they?" Whatever comfort she took from the magnet and from her treat is wiped away cold

It takes her longer than it should to figure out Ash is babbling about the safe and something she needs to get for him.

"Ash... Ash, hold on. You're not making a lick of sense. Where are you going? What's going on. And what the hell is it I'm supposed to get for Dean? A map? What's it a map of?"

A hurried _oh fuck, oh shit, gotta go..._ and the line goes dead. There's not even a dial tone, just a chunk of metal and plastic in her hand that's not telling her a damned thing.

Ellen throws the truck into reverse and there's a heart-stopping moment when she thinks the thing has gone dead on her. 

She shoves the panic aside, takes a deep breath, and turns the key in the ignition.

* * *

The last time Bill ever called her, there wasn't a sign that anything was wrong or was about to go wrong. He was just checking in the way he always did when he got to whatever motel he was staying at.

"How's Jo doing? She asleep yet?"

Ellen smiled to hear the slight anxiety in his voice. "Sent her to bed about ten minutes ago. I'll wake her so you can give her a second 'good-night.' Won't kill her to lose a half hour of sleep, but she might kill _me_ if she knows I let her miss your call. Be careful, though--I told her not to nag you about her birthday, but she probably will."

"Got it." Jo would try to wrangle a promise out of him not to miss her tenth birthday party, and would no doubt sulk when Ellen and Bill told her it was unfair to ask that of them.

Jo was delighted to be able to talk to her daddy, and was sulky when Ellen once again commandeered the phone. It was nothing new. Once Jo had been ushered back to bed and her lights turned out, Ellen retreated to her and Bill's bedroom and they talked for another hour. She was careful to keep her voice low so as not to distract Jo, but Bill did most of the talking, as usual. He told her his theories about what it was they were hunting, his thankfulness that the Good Lord did not see fit to make him like John Winchester, and his opinion that those boys of his needed to be off the road. As for her part, Ellen just enjoyed listening to his voice and ignoring what seemed to be some mighty big hints.

There was nothing at all, nothing to tell her that everything was about to go so wrong.

* * *

Her father eventually stopped shouting, and the sound of waves came tumbling back down the stairs one more. Ellen's head snapped up at the sudden shift in noise, and she blinked herself back to wakefulness. It was well past sunset, and the house was filled with a gray half-light that just made the post-nap haze that much harder to shake off. She picked herself up off the landing, wincing the way Miss Sylvia did when she stood up.

She called up to her father as she walked up the upper flight of stairs. The waves seemed louder than before, no surprise given that the winds had been picking up of late, but Ellen still thought she could hear the reassuringly familiar sounds of puttering and pacing.

Ellen raised her hand to knock on the door, but after a moment's thought, she simply opened it and peeked inside.

Her father was sitting at his desk, holding something in both hands. At first, Ellen thought it was a book, but it was too thin for a grown-up book. When he settled back in the old wooden chair, light glinted off the front of it. A picture frame, then, but because of the reflection, Ellen couldn't see what it was of.

"That you, Nelly-belle?" he asked without looking up. His hair looked liked he'd combed it by running his fingers through it over and over.

"Yeah." Who else would it be? Still, her father looked a little disappointed.

"Probably dinner-time, huh?"

Ellen nodded even though he couldn't see her.

"Wanna go get burgers? It'll be just the two of us, of course," he said. It was just like the ride up, Ellen thought, just like the first few weeks here, before he started holing up in the attic study. When he looked over at her, he had that glint in his eye, the one that said he was going to try to be clever about something.

"Okay."

"That's my girl!" He put the picture down, then danced across the study and tried to swoop her up. Ellen skittered back out of reach, but instead of looking hurt, her father just laughed. 

"You're getting too big for that, aren't you, Nelly-belle?"

"Dad?"

"What?" his smile was fixed, expectant.

"Can we leave? Please? I know a place we can stay, one that doesn't have ghosts in it."

It sounded so stupid, now that she said it aloud. What was Miss Sylvia thinking?

Her father stopped smiling. "We are not leaving."

He sounded so final about it. He'd never sounded like that before.

"What we are going to do, though," he said, the 'aren't I clever?' smirk returning, "is go out and get hamburgers to celebrate."

"Celebrate what?"

He wouldn't tell her. He just laughed and challenged her to race down the stairs, cheating the way he always did by not challenging her until he was already too far ahead for her to catch up. All he'd tell her when he asked, was "you'll see."

She meant to ask him over dinner, but when they got to the Ocean View, some of her father's buddies were there, and they kept on talking and talking while Ellen nodded off in her chair. She vaguely remembered waking up in the back seat of the station wagon, but it was probably just a dream, because they were driving along State Beach, and she was listening to the waves and listening to her father telling Janis about concerts and plays, clambakes and gallery openings, and how much fun they'd have, just the three of them.

The next morning, Ellen woke up to the sound of her father shouting again. Her stomach flopped over. She'd told Miss Sylvia she'd talk to him yesterday, today at the latest. 

She'd tried, and that's all Miss Sylvia said she had to do, but that wasn't enough. Ellen got dressed to the sound of waves and the sound of her father's voice. One seemed to grow louder as the other grew softer, over and over again.

One more try, she told herself. Once he quieted down, she would tell him how worried she was. She could tell him she was having bad dreams, that she couldn't sleep. Breakfast first, though. 

Ellen passed through the living room on her way to the kitchen and saw the checkerboard set up and waiting for her. Black had made its first move, but something about the board seemed _too_ still, as if the other player had made his move and then given up on the game. As usual, she walked up to the board and reached out to make her move.

The checker shot out from under her hand like a bullet. Ellen screamed as it ricocheted off the hall phone, knocking the receiver off its cradle.

Her father started shouting even louder than ever. _No! Today! That's what you promised!_

Ellen stared at the receiver. She thought she could hear another voice, now, hissing, crashing, rising up and down like the waves. Or maybe they _were_ the waves.

She picked up the receiver, meaning to put it back gently and hoping her father hadn't heard it when it fell. But the temptation to listen in was just too much. She shouldn't, she knew she shouldn't, but she did anyway.

All she heard was a dial tone.

Ellen dropped the receiver and ran for the stairs, pitching forward and using her hands as well as her feet as she scrambled up the steep, steep steps as fast as she could.

The door to the attic study was closed, but she could hear her dad all the same. He almost sounded happy, now, and that scared her more than all the angry shouting. 

Ellen tried to open the door, but the glass knob was so cold it burned. Ellen yanked her hand back, and blew on the sear marks. The lines on her palm matched the pattern of the cut glass. She stared at the door for a moment, then hiked up the hem of her tee shirt and used that to grab the doorknob. The door opened an inch. Ellen looked inside, and then slammed the door shut and lit off down the stairs. 

She didn't stop to use the house phone. She just ran and ran down the hill and into town, not stopping when she got a stitch in her side, not stopping when two guys in a pickup truck shouted at her, not stopping until she got to the Steamship Authority. She dropped one of her last dimes, her hand was shaking so bad, and she dropped the next, but she didn't stop to pick them up. She just kept fishing them out of her change purse until she could get one in the slot.

Miss Sylvia didn't ask any questions. She just said she'd be right there.

Ellen hung up the phone and sat down on a bench to wait, right underneath the ferry schedule she'd memorized so long ago. She waited, and thought about the ferry taking her away, taking her home.

She didn't know where that was, but she wanted to go there. She wanted to go there so bad.

* * *

In the end, it wasn't the phone that brought her the bad news. It was a car, long and low and as black as a hearse, pulling up to the Roadhouse three hours before they were due to open.

It was John Winchester, and he was alone. He got out of the car, and would not look up as he walked towards the door. Ellen stayed just inside, gripping tight to the edge of a table. She knew what he was going to say even before he got to the door. 

Knowing didn't make the waiting any easier. The only thing that allowed her to keep standing was knowing that she had to be there for Jo, and that Jo would be there for her.

* * *

Ellen sees the pillar of smoke from the highway. She smells the tang of sulfur, and she knows exactly what she's going to see when she gets home.

What's left of home.

Every instinct says to slam on the brakes, to turn around, to get the hell out of there. She's not going to like what she sees. She knows it'll be worse than it imagines.

But Ellen vowed long ago that she'll never run away again. She pushes the accelerator down as far as she dares, speeding up until the truck's shimmy is almost too much for her to handle, driving home as fast as she can.

When she gets there, it's almost too hot to leave the truck. There's other vehicles around, twisted and burnt. Still, she recognizes them all. There'll be time to mourn them later, and time to give thanks for all the trucks and cars she _doesn't_ see.

Right now, there's work to be done, and only one person to do it. People are dead, but if she understands Ash's last message, there are still people counting on her.

* * *

It took Miss Sylvia nearly thirty minutes to come get her, thanks to the Friday morning ferry traffic. Cars were bumper to bumper, and tourists cut through, ignoring crosswalks on their way to the tee shirt and souvenir stands. It was so clogged up along Water Street that even two police cars with sirens screaming moved through at a crawl.

Ellen watched the families arriving for the long weekend, saw them chattering and laughing and complaining and arguing. She wondered how many of them knew that ghosts were real. They'd come here for a weekend, and they'd go home again, and their lives would be just the same.

"You did what you could, Ellen," Miss Sylvia said on the drive up West Chop. Ellen had barely been able to get the story out straight, and there was a lot she'd left out. "You tried your best to tell him, and that's all anyone can ask."

Ellen looked down at the red marks on her hand, fading now, and tried not to think about what she'd seen when she opened the door. The memory was fading along with the marks, but Ellen remembered enough to wish she hadn't run.

"We'll see what we can do when we get there. I'm not sure I can talk any sense into him, but I'll try. That's all I can do."

It seemed like it was taking forever to get back to the house. Ellen looked out the passenger side window, squinting whenever the trees broke and the light glared off the water. She'd remember that silver, that sunlight that was not-gold, even when she was four times as old as she was then, looking at a refrigerator magnet and thinking it was the wrong color.

She wished her father had let her cry about Janis. She wished she could have seen him cry. 

When they rounded the corner and the privet hedge, she saw flashes of light that weren't the ocean. Two police cars and ambulance blocked the driveway. The yard people were there, too, the two Brazilian men waving their hands wildly.

"Ellen, wait!" Miss Sylvia's shout came too late. Ellen didn't even close the car door behind her as she ran to the house. One of the policemen grabbed her roughly before she could get too close to the cloth-covered body on the grass. She got close enough, though, close enough to see the picture of Janis, its glass spiderwebbed and frame bent.

Her father's notebook, the one where he wrote all his poems, fluttered next to him, pages lifted and dropped by the ocean breeze. It would be the one thing of his she kept, after. Well, not all of it. The last love poems he wrote, and the scraps of novel about a man who brings his love back from the dead? Those she eventually burned. As far as Ellen was concerned, it wasn't her father who wrote those. 

But that was after. Now, the policeman told her _don't look, little lady, don't look_ hurting her as he grabbed her head and turned it so she couldn't see what was on the lawn. But she was able to look up, up to the window of the attic study. 

As she often had before, she saw a figure moving up there. Just a reflection, she told herself, but there was no glass in that attic window. It had all been broken away.

"Ellen, let's go," Miss Sylvia said. "Let me take you home."

There was no more shouting, just the sound of the waves being carried on the sweet-smelling breeze. 

"Where's that?" Ellen asked.

It sounded like they were laughing at her.

* * *

Sometimes, she and Jo would laugh together. Sometimes, they'd fight. That's the way it was with mothers and daughters.

They fought, they made up, they cried. After Bill died, they both cried a lot. When Jo needed to cry, Ellen would let her cry, holding her and rubbing her back the way Miss Sylvia would do for her. She wouldn't deny Jo that, just as she wouldn't hide how much she missed Bill herself.

Sometimes, she saw something of Bill in the way Jo would lean against the bar, or snort in laughter. It warmed her heart and just about killed her at the same time.

Later, when Jo was old enough, and they were both in the right sort of mood, Ellen would tell her some of Bill's funnier stories, some of the ones that she was far, far too young to hear when he was alive. It wasn't quite like having Bill back, but Ellen had a deep sense of satisfaction when the story about the pig had Jo so stricken with laughter she was begging her mother to stop, just stop already.

She told Jo about the magnets, the earliest ones that Jo couldn't remember, and she gave thanks that she already had a California, and that Bill hadn't sent one from the hunt where he died. That way, she can point to each magnet as a promise as she tells Jo stories about the people her daddy helped and all the crazy trouble he got himself into.

She even told Jo a few stories about her own early years. Later, of course, Jo would throw that back in her face, demanding to know why she couldn't hunt when her mother did her first solo hunt when she was _fifteen_. Ellen's response was that's how she _knew_ Jo was too young. The argument only spiraled down from there, ending with an ultimatum and a slamming door.

All Ellen had wanted was to keep Jo home a little bit longer.

The only problem was, the Roadhouse seemed a little less like home once Jo was gone. It might have been different if Jo called, or did a bit more than just send a postcard once in a while.

* * *

Ellen has put North Carolina on the dashboard. It's a magnet, not a compass, but it's leading to her where she needs to go.

It's leading her home.

The Roadhouse is gone. Good friends are dead. She's just seen the gates of Hell broken open. It still hasn't all had time to settle. It probably wouldn't settle for years. She's already had nightmares about sifting through the rubble and seeing Ash's arm sticking out. She has a nasty feeling she'll see other bodies in there in other nightmares--Jo, Bobby, Diana, Joshua, Dean, Sam--people she knows weren't there but who she could lose at any time.

But she's going home. She's still working out the details, but once everything was as settled as it could be back in Wyoming, she headed east. Bobby's making some calls for her, calling people he knows in the South, trying to see what gossip there is about any action in North Carolina.

Neither of them has Jo's cell number, but someone is bound to, somewhere. It's only a matter of time. Meanwhile, Ellen knows how to get from Wyoming to the Roadhouse. And from the Roadhouse, she knows how to get just about anywhere.

Thing is, when she was studying those maps, it wasn't as much knowing how to get from the Roadhouse to far off places as it was the reverse. It's why she studied ferry schedules and bus schedules. It was always about going home. Wherever that was.

Right now, Ellen isn't sure where that's going to be. There will be one, though. She's not a ghost who can't let go of the past, who insists on staying in one place past her time to go. It's not easy, letting go, and she's still got a lot of tears to shed, but it's what has to be done.

It's what she saw Katie Corrigan do after Bud died. It's what she tried her best to do after Bill died. 

Home is not a place. It wasn't until she was older that she realized that her first 'home' had nothing to do with student housing in Berkeley, a commune in Indiana, or an ugly little house outside of Philly. Home was her father reading out loud to her, changing the bits of stories he didn't like. Home was Janis singing along to Peter, Paul and Mary while she painted. The where doesn't matter. It's the who.

She'll miss that cigar box of hers, with all its keepsakes, but she misses the people who gave them to her even more. Bill's books are still out there, she thinks. One of Tessa Corrigan's books left before it could be burned to powder. Marilyn Tuck is still alive, still remembers Miss Sylvia, and would no doubt welcome a call--Ellen memorized the number long ago. 

When she's just a few miles away from the intersection of I-80 and 83, her phone rings.

Given what happened last time, she hesitates to answer, but it's probably just Bobby, checking in with what he has or hasn't heard.

"Hello?"

She can't understand a damned word on the other end of the line. It's all babbling and snuffling and hysterics, but Ellen knows who it is. She crosses over two lanes and pulls onto the shoulder. There's no way she can drive and take this call.

"Jo-baby, where are you? _How_ are you?" All the times she's rehearsed this call, Ellen has always asked Jo when she's coming home. "Are you okay?"

Jo doesn't answer, not right away. She'd had no idea if Ellen would even answer, and she's still in shock It takes a good ten minutes of "I'm okay, I'm right here," before it really sinks in that Ellen is alive. 

Ellen wants to find whoever told Jo what happened to the Roadhouse and hit them upside the head with the butt of her shotgun. If Bobby'd gotten to Jo first, he'd have made sure Jo got the important news first.

"Jo, I'm in Nebraska. I just crossed over from Wyoming." She names the intersection and knows Jo will know exactly where that is. "I'll come find you. Where are you?"

In a day, maybe less, she'll see her baby girl again. What happens next, they can figure out then.

" _K-kentucky. You're okay, you're really okay?_ " Jo sobs.

"I'll be fine." She's not okay, not yet, and she still has to tell Jo about Ash, and about all that happened back in Wyoming. Time for that later, though. They can decide all of that later.

Maybe they'll rebuild the Roadhouse, or find another place that they can make into a home for people like Diana, Roger, Sam and Dean.

She listens for a while longer before cutting Jo off for her own sake. "Jo, you sound awful. I don't want you driving this late at night. Find someplace safe to sleep tonight. I'll keep driving, and we can meet up in St. Louis before noon tomorrow. No, I mean it. Fine...I'll stop for a few hours myself once I hit Kansas City."

They might decide to stay on the road. Together, hopefully. There's a whole lot of nasty that's just been released into the world, and dealing with it isn't a one-person job. They know each other, know their strengths, their weaknesses. They might be tempted to kill each other from time to time, but they'd make a hell of a team.

"Oh, baby, I know. I love you. I'm so sorry... no, don't you apologize. God, I don't want to hang up, but..."

There's so much to say, but every minute she spends on the side of the road is another minute longer she has to wait to see her baby girl.

"I'll call you when I find a place to stay for the night. The phone's got your number. We'll work out the details when I call back. Love you too, baby. See you soon."

Her voice breaks a bit on the last, but that's okay. Jo is bawling openly, and Ellen suspects she doesn't turn off her phone for a while after Ellen hangs up.

That night, as she sleeps in a motel outside of Kansas City, the wind kicks up and wails across the roof and through the trees, but Ellen doesn't dream of the ocean at all.


End file.
